> Unless I've got my history wrong, our dominant standard for what's considered free software or open source, the Debian Free Software Guidelines (later repackaged as the Open Source Definition, wasn't the result of some kind of broad consensus among developers, users, and/or distributors. As badsectoracula pointed out [1] [2], source-available licenses with restrictions used to be more common. But Debian was always strongly aligned with the FSF's ideology; if I'm not mistaken, it was originally funded by the FSF, and of course, the full name of the main Debian distro is Debian GNU/Linux.
The OSI (and indeed the whole open source movement) was formed explicitly as a counter to the FSF from people with a different ideological position. They were by no means temperamentally inclined to follow Debian; they adopted a virtually identical definition of open-source because it's the only one that works.
The OSI (and indeed the whole open source movement) was formed explicitly as a counter to the FSF from people with a different ideological position. They were by no means temperamentally inclined to follow Debian; they adopted a virtually identical definition of open-source because it's the only one that works.