Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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Usually when people use the term "open source", they'll be referring to an OSI-approved definition. I do distinguish between open source (lowercase) and Open Source (uppercase) but I'm in a minority on that point, most of your readers won't.

In general, "source available" or "shared source" are terms that will lead to less confusion in situations like this.

In terms of proprietary licenses, Aseprite is very good. It's one of the very, very few proprietary software products that I allow myself to use while developing games. But calling it open source is at best going to spark some disagreement/confusion, and at worst going to spark some needless debate from people (like me) who believe that the FOSS community needs to more closely guard how those terms are used and abused online.

Note that the main Aseprite dev also doesn't use the words "open source" when describing its changed license: https://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/

I don't know why OSI should get to define what 'Open Source' is.

Because they had a criteria and they conducted a review of lots of licenses. It's not any less "gatekeepery" if some random person or company takes their random license and says "here, we say this one license is open source based on our own criteria that we invented for ourselves, accept it."

You're confused. A person or company claiming some term indeed applies to something is not gate keeping. It's when the opposite happens, when a person or company denies you use of that term, for arbitrary reasons.

So, I'd say OSI is, by definition, designed to be the gatekeepers of "Open Source".

Unfortunately they don't own the term and can't tell anyone what to do with it.

You're right, but that misses the point, they put in the work to define and promote the term over a span of more than 20 years. If your plan is to undo that 20 years worth of work, you had better be prepared to take on the same amount of work over the same time span, and I hope the only reason it's done is because we can verifiably prove the results will be better for everyone.

But fortunately, the overall community including the vast majority of people involved in packaging and distributing Open Source software agree with them, and in a lot of ways they do own the term and they do get to tell people what they can do with it.

You can go argue with every major Linux distro, the Homebrew devs, package managers, and most key Open Source advocates if you want. Get them to change their definitions and the software they accept, and then maybe you'll have a point.

But in the meantime, you shouldn't be surprised when the community lashes out at you for appropriating decades of PR and public education just because you don't like that the definition we've always used to describe ourselves doesn't fit a particular business model. OSI/GNU have authority on this subject because we the community grant them authority. We're not interested in people coming in and leeching off the goodwill of Open Source while simultaneously restricting users' rights.

We are as a community guarding our terminology because our terms have value, and OSI is the standardized, commonly understood definition that we have advocated for. If you want to call that gatekeeping, I don't care. I don't want Open Source to be like the "organic" aisle at the grocery store, I want it to mean something specific.

I just think if they'd picked an original term and trademarked it, the whole thing would be simpler. It could be Open Source (tm) and they could enforce it, rather than relying on 'lashing out' as you say.

Okay fine. And your solution to that is to repeat the exact same mistake by trying to fight over the same term?

On some level, you have to know that the phrase Open Source has value. That's why companies want to use it. That's why they're arguing over broadening the definition and calling the OSI a gatekeeper. They want to be able to use that phrase because it has positive connotations. It's not a linguistic debate, it's a debate over being able to imply that some software is Free even when it's not.

If you think that the OSI made a mistake by picking an existing phrase, that's a totally valid criticism you can have, but as a community we're still not going to let you redefine the phrase. We've invested in this. Take your own advice and come up with a new word for these new licenses.

This topic has turned up recently on HN. [0][1] Your position here matches my own: open source is a precise term of art in the software community, the way flap is a precise term of art in aviation. [1] Trademarks are not especially relevant, and neither is the early history of the term.

To put it in legalistic terms: you can face legal consequences for false advertising despite making no use of trademarked language. The court will not be interested in the etymology of the words you used, that's an academic matter, it's the modern meaning that counts.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25366825

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834342

Doesn't matter though, I will still call a spade - "spade". You can keep calling a shovel - "spade", just don't be surprised that no one understands what you mean.

I would agree with you if anyone was saying "hey the term open source doesn't mean anything and you can use it for whatever you want" but that's not what I've ever seen happening, and I doubt anyone wants that because it would make the term useless. What we actually do see is other groups trying to promote their own alternate definition of the term and trying to deny the OSI's usage, for equally arbitrary reasons. It's the same form of gatekeeping. Please just come up with another phrase, that's what the OSI did after all when they found the term "free software" to be inadequate.

> Please just come up with another phrase, that's what the OSI did

I think a bit of a myth. There's documented existing use of the term in the same context before the OSI say they came up with it, and they were denied the trademark by the USPTO because it was an existing simply descriptive term.

I'm not saying they came up with the term before anyone in the world. While the term was used previously, it didn't have the concrete definition it does now. That's why they were able to do what they did.

You said 'just come up with another phrase' and that's what they didn't do - they took an existing phrase with a similar meaning, and started to tell everyone they were going to advocate a different meaning. And then tried to trademark it to steal it from the community!!

Sorry I didn't clarify -- They came up with a phrase that, while it existed, didn't have a concrete definition. To give an example, if someone right now wants to create "Source Available Initiative" or something like that I think that would conceptually be fine, even though the term is already in use, there is no organization that is clearly defining what it means. Does that explain it better? (Although I think creating more organizations like this is a terrible idea for other reasons, mostly having to do with license proliferation)

> "Source Available Initiative" or something like that I think that would conceptually be fine

I can understand that position but... they tried to trademark just 'open source' - without the 'initiative' part. They were told to rod off by the USPTO because you're not allowed to do that, so it's not ok by the law, whatever you think of it.

I wasn't speaking of the trademark, you don't need a trademark to publish and promote a public definition of a term. Misusing that term doesn't have legal consequences but it won't stop people from getting upset at you for misleading them, e.g. your customers getting miffed when they learn the "open source" option you provide actually means they can't do anything with the source at all that they would expect to be able to do with the popular Apache/MIT/GPL/BSD options. (Correct me if I'm mistaken, but just those 4 licenses seem to be used for the vast majority of open source now)

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