Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

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You seem to be confusing whether something is "open source" with "what kind of license does the code have".

Something being "open source" does not imply anything about its license.

Suggesting that only GPL-like software is allowed to use the term "open source" is crazy. It doesn't reflect the world we live in at all: there are thousands of projects on github without a license, or with some "free for non-military use"-type of license, or MIT/BSD-like licenses...

EDIT: "the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” (Richard Stallman, GNU Philosophy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... ). Not that Stallman did much better with "free software", which as the article argues, has the obvious meaning that 'the software is "for free"'.

Having to avoid expressions like "free software" or "open source" because two organizations decided to appropriate common english expressions to give them a complicated meaning is nuts.

> OSI decided to appropriate the term "Open source" to refer to something slightly weaker than "Free Software" but much stronger than "you can look at the source code". They are not in their right to do that.

This is incorrect. Over 20 years ago people who would later be part of OSI _coined_, not co-opted, the term (within the scope of software). It was coined to mean _exactly the same thing_ as "Free Software"; the OSD was directly derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and there have only been two licenses, as I recall, that are OSI approved and the FSF have said are non-free.

You also confuse "OSI-approved license" with "GPL", because the OSI (and FSF) have approved permissive BSD and MIT and many other non-copyleft licenses. Here you go: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

This project does not have a GPLv3 license,

And? There are a lot of Open Source licenses, and even Free Sofware licenses besides GPLv3.

but neither does LLVM (and many people do not consider LLVM to be free software

Note that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are different - albeit related - things.

nor the dozens projects on Github that don't have a license at all, or that have a license of the form "Free for non-commercial purposes" or the millions of flavors of that ("Free for non-military use", etc.).

And those things are not Open Source. They may be "Source Available", or "Shared Source" or "Something Else", but "Open Source" has a de facto definition of "uses a license which is OSD compliant."

That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto (and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...).

The distinction really doesn’t seem that important for most use cases so it’s not that surprising a weaker, possibly more useful interpretation has become common...

That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto

There isn't any significant confusion. There is a token amount of confusion, which is pretty much always clarified every time one of these threads comes up.

(and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...).

It's de facto, not de jure, because OSI has no authority to enforce their definition, since they don't have a trademark (at least not a registered trademark) on the term "Open Source". What makes it the de facto definition is just usage. By and large, among the people who care about the legal details of Open Source licensing, the OSD is accepted. Yes, there are a handful of exceptions, but that's OK. It doesn't change the basic point.

I guess in my experience, the phrase is routinely used to refer to code availability and often the fact that a licensing fee doesn’t need to be negotiated or paid in order to run the code on our servers (either in an academic or corporate setting), which is a weaker requirement than the OSI definition.

Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning. I’m not saying it’s correct usage, but it’s definitely real and frequent.

It’s my impression a non-negligible number of people share the same understanding, evidence by the fact that this discussion apparently is recurring? Even those who corrected the Defold release language knew what was intended, even if they said it was incorrect usage of the phrase.

Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small; I just don’t think that is true based on my day to day experiences.

Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning.

I'm not talking about "people who are particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition" though. I'm talking about people who are "particularly interested in the actual technicalities of what OSS is", not all of whom may agree with the OSD. But I still argue that such a significant majority do that it constitutes the de facto definition.

Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small;

Not at all. I am saying that the people using that phrase in the "looser" sense, as you put it, are using it in a colloquial and not technical sense, and that such usage has no meaning as far as what the de facto meaning is, when used in an actual technical context. That's just lack of knowledge, not any attempt to create a different definition.

I see it more like somebody who doesn't know much about cars referring to an engine block as a carburetor. Even if a lot of people make that same mistake, it's still a mistake and the actual definitions of "engine block" and "carburetor" don't change.

No, I'm not. The term open source is defined here: https://opensource.org/osd

Copyleft, free software, and open source all have different meanings, and GitHub has no restrictions on the license of software using its platform, and you're deliberately confoudning these things here to sow confusion. There are millions of different software licenses, yes, but that doesn't make them all open source. Give me a break. Is Windows "open source" by your reckoning? I has a license, after all, and I can decompile it, after all.

Decompiling Windows is punishable by law.

Which law?

EULAs are not laws

Aren't EULAs are enforced by the CFAA? Isn't that why Aaron Schwartz is no longer with us?

That’s not entirely clear, actually. Like the other comment says, the CFAA has been used to criminalize violations of EULAs in the past and the courts have been split on that idea: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/violating-terms-use-is...

Violating a EULA shouldn’t be a crime but it’s not always that clear cut.

We're talking about EULAs, but your article and the Swartz case concern Terms of Use, which are related but different. Terms of Use concern access to someone else's computer system, hence why overzealous lawyers and prosecutors have tried to expand the CFAA to cover them.

EULAs concern what an end user can do with a piece of software on their own system or systems they control. I don't see how this intersects the CFAA at all.

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