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Comment by zzzcpan | Hacker News Reader

> The OSI owns the definition

No, OSI doesn't own the definition and doesn't get to define open source. Some people agree with that definition, some don't. Nobody has to though. You can't really own what other people think, you can only try to agree on some definition during interaction. No need to pretend there is some universal truth that they just don't know about. It's an agreement, not truth.

And OSI might become irrelevant anyway if it doesn't change in light of recently emerged licenses with more restrictions and doesn't certify them in some way. People will just stick to a handful of popular known licenses and call them open source.

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Yes, they do! They are the ones that put together the OSD (https://opensource.org/osd) which they derived from the DGSL. No one else has defined open source, not even Richard M. Stallman. His definition is for "Free Software", not "Open Source".

So when it comes to who owns the definition, the definitive answer is the OSI. Anything else is just subjective opinions.

You must not work. Because businesses that do REAL BUSINESS and use Open Source are happy that there is the OSD and approved OSI licenses. That way, we can make real, LEGAL decisions. For individual developers, they might have a different idea of what the definition is, but the actual reference to what defines it is at: https://opensource.org/osd

Reading that will clarify what open source is and isn't. Anything else is just "free software" and should hunt down the FSF for licenses and such. RMS has a very different opinion on software that DOES NOT WORK for large corporations.

OSD is said subjective opinion, not a universally agreed upon definition.

I think what I'm seeing over and over in this thread is people talking past each other because the grandparent shouldn't have assumed we were all working in the same context.

I agree, in the legal context of business decisions, OSI has a very specific claim to the term 'open source' and declaring that mongoDB "IS NOT OPEN SOURCE" is a warning directed towards people making business judgements around legal risk.

To everyone else, we use the term 'open source' because we heard someone else say it, and when we write software we say 'oh it will be open source' without getting into the nitty gritty of what license it will use and whether that's OSI approved.

> in the legal context of business decisions, OSI has a very specific claim

But it doesn't. In the legal context of business decisions conformance to an OSI definition of "Open Source" means exactly nothing and OSI-certified "Open Source" even less than nothing. It doesn't help you with anything and doesn't protect you from anything.

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