Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Open source does mean source available to many people, especially the non-programmer lay-public, no matter how much OSI and people who adopt OSI’s definition dislike it, c.f. the dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source

(And BTW I like OSI’s definition!)

Instead of claiming the words “open source” always mean OSI’s definition, it’d be better to clarify up front that you’re talking about OSI’s “Open Source Definition”, which is (effectively) a trademark or term of art and does not preempt all possible definitions of the phrase. (Special note that the words “open source” do not always refer to code.)

The turf battle over the words free and open seems silly to me, with both sides arguing that the other side’s word literally means something other than they intend. Stallman has argued that open means source available, and OSI has argued that free means price. Both sides are right, and both sides are stubborn too.

I would argue completely the opposite, and that we actually have a very clear set of descriptors available to us, each of which is a subset of the following ones:

* Free Software - meets FSF's four freedoms

* Open Source - meets OSI's definition

* Source Available - you can read the source code

Yes we have clear & good descriptors available. I wasn’t arguing against those. I was simply pointing out that those aren’t the only definitions of the words free & open, which is a fact. It’s a fact that FSF and OSI have both used in their own arguments! I’m slightly surprised by the pushback and downvotes (which probably means I didn’t state things clearly or come off how I intended). OSI’s definition is logical today but took a long time to develop. It’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine never having heard, but if you had never heard it, you almost certainly wouldn’t jump to OSI’s definition upon hearing “open source” the first time. The lay public generally doesn’t either, and don’t know about licenses and the software community’s terms of art.

Source available but you can't use it professionally or commercially doesn't feel open source at all to me, and I disapprove of trying to weasel word around that.

Rather than clarify confusion & raise a real and important distinction, this post carries water for obfuscation and confusion: if people aren't clear the answer isn't to loosen the definition, it's to make the distinction clearer.

Non-programmers and the lay public do not assume what source available means, nor what open source means, in terms of what you can and can’t do with it. Most lay people would assume that if source is available, then you can do what you want with it. This is what a lot of programmers assumed before OSI and FSF existed. Saying that many people think these two terms (open source, and source available) mean the same thing does not imply that anyone is suggesting that you can’t use code professionally or commercially. It’s a negative assumption on your part to accuse people of weaseling just because they don’t know your industry term of art definition.

Honestly, I never heard of people being confused about open source like this. Either you know about open source and then you know exactly what it means, or you know nothing about it at all. At least, that has been my experience. Open source, FOSS and source available are quite well defined and their definitions commonly known amongst anyone with even the slightest clue about software licenses.

Some might argue this confusion is intentional and injected by people trying to obfuscate that their fav is in fact not open source.

In my view this is little more than FUD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com