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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

No, "Open Source" is not "just that". This word combination has a specific meaning, not equal to a simple sum of these words. Similarly, "sparkling water", "hot dog", or "heavy metal" have meanings distinct form the simple sum of the meanings of constituent words.

The notion of "Open Source" has an agreed-upon definition, understood widely within the community of software development practice: https://opensource.org/osd

By the same token, "Free Software" has a specific, narrow meaning: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

What would you tell a person who would peddle you deep-frozen apple juice as "hard cider", because it's technically cider, and is undeniably hard?

(While at it: I must praise the choice of the font on the page, super clean and legible. It's Lexend, freely available from Google Fonts.)

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Who made opensource.org the king?

It's called a consensus.

Playing devil's advocate, I claim that the consensus is that open source just means public code, not free licenses. Prove me wrong.

I claim that a hot dog is a dog, not some kind of sandwich. Prove me wrong.

Is that just by consensus?

They made up the term specifically from looking at word combinations that were not in common use and could reasonably be trademarked for this specific purpose. One of the problems with the at the time popular term Free Software was that it could not be trademarked. They did a thorough job but in the end it wasn't enough.

The definition at https://opensource.org/osd has existed with only very minor changes since 1999.

If you want a different definition, all you have to do is invent a new term. The term "open source" was invented by the people who made the definition at the URL above. (It had existing uses, but the people who made the definition above were the first to apply the term to software or software licenses.)

They absolutely were NOT the first to apply the term to software in general. See https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part... for many proven uses of "open source" being used to describe source-available software prior to the OSI's existence.

As for being the first to apply the term to software licenses, yes you're correct there. But that's the inherent source of this endless confusion: they took an existing term which didn't relate to licenses, and redefined it to be entirely about licenses.

It's quite ironic to say "If you want a different definition, all you have to do is invent a new term" since that's literally what the OSI failed to do!

Edit to add: I would appreciate it if downvoters would cite what specific part of the linked article you disagree with, considering that it has numerous instances of irrefutable proof of "open source" being used to describe software prior to 1998, including by famous folks like Bill Joy.

The words open and source have been around far longer than that

Is that why they lost the copyright case?

A bunch of for-profit companies proped OSI up to exclude "open source" projects that are not free to use for businesses so they can profit more from OSS community and you eat it up.

Did for-profit companies prop up Stallman, too? According to you they must have because his definition of Free Software likewise excludes any license (e.g., no commercial use) that restricts how the software can be used.

As does the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

(Also, I think you mean trademark case, not copyright case.)

So what would you call projects with restrictive licenses but with their source code made public?

Since I started on the internet in 1991, people have been calling that source-code-available software.

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