That's not how it works. These terms have a specific meaning and using them for something that's not covered by the definition dilutes their effectiveness.
On top of that, they even use "free and open source", which refers to certain moral freedoms rather than license mechanics.
I don't think I agree - is the source publicly available? Yes? Then it's open source. I understand that Open Source Foundation has written a definition, good for them - but they do not have the monopoly or final say on defining the term or how it's used(or rather - I don't see why should I recognize and accept their definition).
They came up with the term, and it's extremely widely used that way. And large parts of the software community will assume malice on your part if you present something as open source that doesn't fit the definition.
EDIT: IMHO it's in the best interest of everyone working on such licenses to come up with a new positive term and position that, instead of burning goodwill by trying to co-opt the "open source" label. (E.g. if I remember correctly, in the discussions around cloud software, "fair software" was one label used. Nice and positive word, not stepping on existing communities toes). And in reverse I hope people would be accepting of attempts with such new licenses if they keep the messaging straight.
It's well documented that the term was in use, referring to "source available" software no less, before they claim to have invented it. It might be a case of two groups coming up with the same term, but they were not the first.
> The Open Source Initiative's mission will be to own and defend the Open Source trademark, to manage the www.opensource.org resources, to develop branding programs attractive to software customers and producers, and to advance the cause of open-source software and serve the hacker community in other appropriate way
Which they since abandoned because "there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark "open source"; the mark is too descriptive" (and one suspects because the mark was already in use in trade of software, see the xent.com link above) https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
They have no special rights to the term open source. I wish people (including the OSI) would stop pretending otherwise. You can think that it's a good idea to use their definition without relying on falsehoods.
Nonsense. It's utter pedantry to pretend that a couple of isolated posts where they happen to use the words "open" and "source" together proved anything. In your first example, they're clearly using it as "open source-code", not "open-source code". Your second link doesn't work.
But the fact is, if it was a phrase in current use, you wouldn't just have one or two examples. There would be thousands. Where are all the other mentions of Caldera's "Open Source" software?
> It's utter pedantry to pretend that a couple of isolated posts where they happen to use the words "open" and "source" together proved anything. In your first example, they're clearly using it as "open source-code", not "open-source code". Your second link doesn't work.
In the body it is used (hyphens not added)
2x: “open-source” not followed by the word code.
3x: “open-source code”.
1x: “open source code”.
Plus in the 6 word tile as “open source” not followed by the word code. And open source is the main object.
Moreover it’s not just a throwaway phrase but a label they are using for their model
Caldera believes an open source code model benefits the industry in many ways.
They continue to be extremely interested in DOS and support our open-source technology direction
Caldera’s OEM and Channel Partners can utilize the open-source code models for DOS and Linux to create
I’m honestly not sure how it could be any clearer...
(I love it when I can copy and paste old arguments ;))
> But the fact is, if it was a phrase in current use, you wouldn't just have one or two examples. There would be thousands. Where are all the other mentions of Caldera's "Open Source" software?
It doesn't have to be extremely popular to be in use. The truth of the matter is that there wasn't much "open source" or "source available" software. The other truth of the matter is I have finite patience for trawling through old mailing lists looking for the term open source.
As you yourself note there is a bump dating to... 1975... the truth of this is the OSI used a term already in use and made it more popular, not that they invented it.
> Can you spot where the OSI appeared? The reason they couldn't get their trademark is because they had been so successful in promoting the term.
No, it was because the term is merely descriptive. It would also be because the term was already in use if the PTO noticed that (but they often don't - and I haven't tracked down the documents to check if they did).
> It doesn't have to be extremely popular to be in use. The truth of the matter is that there wasn't much "open source" or "source available" software.
That's outright nonsense. Just for comparison, Linux had already been around for the better part of a decade by that point, Red Hat had incorporated in 1993, and GNU/FSF might as well have been wrapping up the tour for their fifth album. To say that there wasn't much of the stuff in 1998 is either either ignorance, delusion, or both.
Open source software projects were a bajillion years old by that point, but nobody was calling them that, what with the term not yet having been invented and all. They were (begrudgingly!) "free software" until it was decided that mozilla.org would be a thing.
The word computer used to refer only to humans who did computation. If today you said I have a powerful computer, and brought out a human, other people would correctly claim that you are misleading them.
The phrase open source software has an extremely well-known meaning. Uses like this, which fraudulently claim to be open source software even though they fail to comply with the normal definition as used for over 20 years, is simply an exploitative fraud.
If they want to join the open source community, they would be very welcome. But trying to say that they're part of a community they're not is not okay. It's especially dangerous to the people who are not familiar with the law and might make big decisions for themselves based on falsehoods.
Today, trying to use that phrase in the way they're using it is deceptive.
As a private person you're free to use words as you wish, but in this case this is false advertising by a company. Go on try to sell some pork dish as "vegan" or "kosher" food and I'll look how fast you'll be brought to a court. This is no different.
You are being blinded by your political agenda. This source code is readily available and costs nothing, thus it is both open and free. Much of the machinery here is relevant to me, so I can learn about the nature of the system through the code and adapt design lessons to completely unrelated applications. Without this free and open code no such thing would be possible.
I understand that you have nothing but loathing and contempt for my approach to software development and you are welcome to promote your philosophy but you will find it impossible to bend simple language to your wishes as long as there are people who see things completely differently.
Microsoft disagrees with you, and has since at least 2001, well before they cared about open source software at all. They use the terms "source-available" or "shared source". So do... all the other big enterprises. They don't want to confuse people; they want the restrictions on licensing to be clear.
What words would you like me to use for open source software that you're not going to trample over in 5 years when it becomes convenient for advertising your software?
> What words would you like me to use for open source software that you're not going to trample over in 5 years when it becomes convenient for advertising your software?
Option a) Makeup a non-generic not already in use term and trademark it.
Option b) Just say "licensed under <well_known_license>".
What you're required to do to get the exclusivity you're looking for is well established in the rules we are all required to play by known as "the law".
We're also required, when communicating with each other, to communicate in good faith and to create a shared understanding. There's no law about that, it's just pointless to try and communicate if we can't do that.
Otherwise, I can say something like this and expect you to understand me: Most people believe that an onlooker underhandedly ignores an omphalos, but they need to remember how non-chalantly the cigar about an espadrille laughs out loud. When a menagé à trois for a labyrinth rejoices, a starlet living with a clodhopper feels nagging remorse. An unsightly impresario is darling. When the surly menagé à trois starts reminiscing about lost glory, a curmudgeonly bubble ceases to exist.
Or I can redefine water to mean any clear liquid, including sulfuric acid, and sell that to you, and claim you should've understood what I meant when you die.
What you're trying to argue for is more akin to redefining "clear liquid" to mean water, and then trying to argue I'm deceiving you when I sell you a "clear liquid" and it happens to be sulfuric acid.
The words "open source" have a plain pre-existing meaning. "Water" does not.
Now to go ahead and make your argument for you - this use of the term open source might be like if I went ahead and sold you (having to force this a bit, since I've failed to find a good example of a noun) insurance against kicking the bucket, and then I tried to define it as insurance against literally kicking buckets. Possibly you can find a better example, but that's the best I could come up with and
- "the bucket" clearly distinguishes the term from being merely descriptive
- Selling insurance against kicking buckets makes no sense, unlike "open source software" where "open" means "anyone can look at it"
- Kicking the bucket is a phrase with a much longer history than OSI defined open source software.
"Grey" and "water" are both valid words that compose in English. And yet "grey water" is a specific thing. If you showed up and started shouting, "But it's water! And it's grey!" about some water that had been contaminated with fecal matter, then you'd rightfully be shut down.
Nobody has a single authority on what words mean. That doesn't mean terms don't have established meanings, and it'll make things difficult for you if you insist on using them differently.
So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today, and this isn't going to mislead anyone at all? How about that "water" can now be used do describe any clear liquid, including sulfuric acid?
Go find your own words. "Shared source" has been used for literally decades to mean Defold's exact situation - why would you not use that?
>So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today, and this isn't going to mislead anyone at all
Yes you can, some people will hate it some people will like it, just like anything else
> So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today
This is actually a rather good description of what the OSI did. They took a term with plain meaning that was already in use and tried to define it to mean something else.
Now people are getting mad when other people use the phrase "Donal Trump is a space alien" to literally mean that "Donald Trump is an alien from space".
(I can only assume that people have previously said that Donal Trump is a space alien... there are a lot of strange people in the world after all)
No, "open source" was not in common use at the time that OSI decided to use it. It's certainly not been used to mean anything except roughly OSI's definition until approximately two years ago, when Redis Labs decided to push the Commons Clause as being open source.
It was in use, both in software and in the world at large (especially the intelligence community). I suppose how it depends how you define "common" but "people use the term in official announcements and assume everyone knows what they mean" seems common enough to me.
OK, now find me regular usage of "open source", applied to software, by more than one person trying to sell something, as meaning something different from the OSI definition between approx 2000 and 2017.
You haven't shown that "open source" was in common use at the time OSI decided to use it (1988 is earlier than 1996), nor that it's been in common use as meaning something else when applied to software since then. One company trying to sell something doesn't make it common use, either - otherwise I could claim that my water is from a "free source" and declare that for all eternity referring to free source must mean it comes from my specific river.
Ah, thank you. Either way, one company using the term once before that doesn't mean that it is a phrase in common usage. It also doesn't mean that the term hasn't changed to mean something else in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of developers since them, and using it to mean its plain meaning will only ever cause confusion, and potentially result in people doing things you didn't want with the source code.
Epic, Microsoft, IBM, and hundreds of other companies, big and small, have been careful to avoid this issue specifically because there is an existing definition and it causes confusion.
> OSI […] took a term with plain meaning that was already in use and tried to define it to mean something else.
If this is what happened, then they succeeded.
Absolutely nobody is arguing in good faith that there exists a community of people using the term “open source software” to mean something specific to them, which is different from how the OSI defines the term. This community of people, if it ever existed, certainly does not exist anymore. It’s all corporate shills trying to argue in bad faith that they are allowed to call something “open source”. If it was really a confusing problem, they would call it something else; there are enough terms available. But it’s important to them to be able to fool people that it is OSI Open Source when in fact it isn’t, so they call it “open source”.
And then we have the literal-minded people who claim that word definitions are a question of dictionaries, historical precedent or etymology. These people are helping absolutely no-one, except the aforementioned corporations. Language is defined by current general use, and in current language, “open source software” means the OSI definition.
> It’s all corporate shills trying to argue in bad faith that they are allowed to call something “open source”.
I've seen basically 0 evidence of this. As far as I've seen it's primarily people like me arguing that you can't lambast people for using words to mean what they mean (even if the specific combination of words has a now common second meaning), and people who naively use the term without understanding that there's a hoard of rabid programmers who insist that the phrase "open source" has been imbued with special meaning and using it otherwise is to summon the devil.
No corporate shill who has an understanding of the situation would be dumb enough to use the term and get into that fight.
> people who naively use the term without understanding
> No corporate shill who has an understanding of the situation would be dumb enough to use the term and get into that fight.
These are not people who made an innocent mistake. The product owner of Defold is commenting in this very thread (without any disclaimers, I might add). They want people to believe that it is really OSI “open source”, when in fact it isn’t.
I tend to believe that the product owner at Defold was genuinely unaware that there is this movement to redefine "open source" to mean something other than its plain meaning. After all, all "OSI open source" software is also "Plain Meaning open source", and it's the sort of pedantry that many people really don't give a fuck about.
It certainly didn't help them to use the term open source here, instead of everyone discussing the game engine they're releasing completely for free to the public with no strings attached and source code attached they're discussing the meaning of the term open source and accusing them of fraud.
It is not released to the public with no strings attached, that's the entire point here. There's very specific strings attached around some use of this work.
Not only do they not hold a trademark, they tried to acquire a trademark and failed because it was "too descriptive" (and I suspect because it was already in use).
The source to this web page is publicly viewable, right-click->view page source. That doesn't make it open source. It is a standard copyrighted object. Publicly viewable != open source.
I might be nitpicking, but viewing the source of this website HN does not give you the source code for Hacker News - there is plenty of other code working in the background that you can't see and which is required to make the website work.
Clicking on "view page source" is more akin taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower, while "open source" would be if France posted the architectural plans in the open. But just because the plans are out in the open doesn't mean that someone doesn't hold copyright to them.
The US government also defines the term "open source software" as allowing any use, both in top-level executive branch policies and in law. See my lengthy post elsewhere here for the details.
There is a term for that: source-available software. It covers all the cases where you can get the source, but the license is too restrictive to be classified as open-source.
"Open-source software" is a term, it has its meaning. Diluting it for the sake of marketing does not serve the community well.
Standard example. The source code for Windows 2000 is publicly available. Do you want to try telling Microsoft that it's open source? Don't break the accepted definition.
Was it published by Mirosoft officially? Then yeah, absolutely, I'd argue that Windows 2000 is open source. Was it leaked by someone through shady means? Then no, of course it isn't open source, since accessing it is not necessarily legal depending on the jurisdiction.
No, this is not open source. It is "source available".
When someone makes a blatantly false claim, we have another word for it: "fraud".
A Rose by Any Other Name May smell as sweet, but lying is still not okay. The phrase "open source software" has a meaning. If you just mean source available, say that instead.
No, that's not what fraud is. Let me focus on the US legal system (different jurisdictions are different, though I suspect other jurisdictions are similar).
Fraud is the intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. The government does NOT try to officially define every phrase in the language, nor does it need to. That's not how it works. The issues are, (1) does there appear to be intentional deception, and (2) Would that deception result in unfair/unlawful gain or the loss of the legal right? Issue 2 is true by definition (open source software as the term is generally used always allows people to use the software for any purpose, including commercial users, and this doesn't provide that right, so by definition the victim is losing a legal right). So we're really only asking the first issue - is there intentional deception? I presume you'd argue that there's no deception. Only a court can decide that for sure, but if someone uses a phrase likely to mislead most people, that's at least getting dangerously close.
So no, a government doesn't have to define the term. But even if you think that governments have to use the term that way... well, governments do define the term "open source software" just like OSI does. Again, I'll focus on the US, but this is by no means limited to the US.
The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo of August 8, 2016 (M-16-21) "Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software" https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me... defines the term "open source software" as follows:
"Open Source Software (OSS): Software that can be accessed, used, modified, and shared by anyone. OSS is often distributed under licenses that comply with the definition of “Open Source” provided by the Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/osd) and/or that meet the definition of “Free Software” provided by the Free Software Foundation (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)" Notice that it can be "used by anyone" and it specifically references the OSI's definition. That memo included a mandate to release a certain amount of code as OSS - which meant the government had to define the term, and yes, they used the normal definition for it.
That OMB memo cites the US Department of Defense (DoD)'s official policy on open source software that was released in 2009: https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/FOSS/2009OSS.... - it says in 2.2.b.1.iv "Open source licenses do not restrict who can use the software or the fields of endeavor in which the software can be used." So the US DoD thinks that commercial use is by definition allowed by open source licenses. This wasn't even the first government memo about open source software; they had another one in 2003.
I've been citing executive branch policies, but it's also in US law. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2018 at https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2810... section 875 requires the DoD to participate more fully in a "pilot program for open source software", and cites the policy and definition of OMB M-16-21 ("Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software") dated August 8, 2016. Yes, that's a US law, and it by reference defines "open source software" using the OSI definition. That is, commercial use must be allowed.
So yes, the US government DOES have a definition of open source software, and it requires permission for any field of endeavor, just like OSI's definition does. It's been that way for almost 20 years.
Caveat: I am NOT a lawyer. But I've cited my sources, look them up if you have questions.
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