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Comment by ssddanbrown | Hacker News Reader

Additionally, this submission's title was changed from "Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today" to "Gumroad’s license wouldn’t meet the widely regarded definition of open source"

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For whatever reason. It was the original title and is descriptive. Are the mods having a bad day?

I'm not sure, maybe they don't want to take a hard stance on the issue either way (to indicate how open source is defined on HN). Dang has been receptive to input and updated (what I believed to be) misrepresenting "open source" titles in the past though.

This post also seemed to be thrown off the front page for some reason.

It's customary on HN to avoid a repetition of a topic that's already being actively discussed. The original post is still on the front page and the licensing issue is being heavily discussed there. I've linked to your post from that thread.

Ah, okay, thanks for explaining and cross-linking!

No worries!

Sure, but the title change is strange. I'd even say changing the meaning makes it outrage bait in the first place, because now HN has taken a stance, where before it was just the article author's opinion.

The title we changed it to is a verbatim sentence from the post (which is what we always try to do when we change a title), and thus is also/still the article author's opinion.

But with this title, the discussion can be drawn towards the question of whether the license would or wouldn’t meet the widely regarded definition of open source, rather than whether it meets each commenter’s own definition of open source, which would be a much less gratifying discussion.

NB: A subtitle is one option HN prefers, but there are other options, including lifting a line from the article itself. "Always" is too strong a qualifier.

(I've frequently suggested title changes to HN's mod team, I'm pretty familiar with this.)

And, just so readers don't have to take my word, here's dang on the topic:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29425675> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42679582>

Maybe they bought SPY calls yesterday

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