Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecb_penguin | Hacker News Reader

This is an opinion article and you should realize that opinions do not make definitions.

"Conversely, Richard Stallman argues the "obvious meaning" of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted"

See, here's another Wikipedia article with another opinion that disagrees, and RMS is obviously an authority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#%22Open%22_versus_...

All of this is pointless so the common and accepted definition should be preferred. Which does not add extra political criteria for requirements.

View on HN

In my experience the common and accepted definition generally matches with the one the OSI uses, people generally use “shared source” or something to refer to things that don’t fit that

Well, you'd be wrong: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source

In case you don't know, the dictionary doesn't prescribe meaning, it catalogs the commonly accepted usage of a word. That's why it listed "literally" to mean "figuratively", because along the way, people started using "literally" to mean "figuratively", so that's the definition now.

The common definition of open source does not match the OSI definition...

> people generally use “shared source” or something

"Shared source" was a Microsoft license and not at all generally accepted by anyone. A quick Google search found no references to this term used to describe open source.

That’s a highly simplified, non-technical definition for people who aren’t necessarily computer literate. Compressing it to a single sentence will leave out important details about the word’s usage

On the topic of descriptivism/prescriptivism, Richard Stallman is very pedantic and prescriptive about how people use language (e.g. the GNU/Linux thing) so I don’t really respect him as an authority on this topic at all

Also if there are restrictions you can argue it doesn’t even meet that definition because it’s not “freely available”

I may have mixed up “shared source” and “source available” (which seems more common)

I’ve put a poll on a Discord server I’m on (about calculators, so I don’t think there will be bias) and I’ll report back with what people think

Edit: I had three people vote and they agreed with me but also someone mentioned that I should probably let it go now which fair, it’s too easy to get invested in Internet arguments that don’t matter

Reply on news.ycombinator.com