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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I won't argue about FOSS, as a specific term of art. But "open source" is a generic thing, without a single rightful authority that controls what it means.

As a member of the open source community, I think "open source" is what we make of it. Open source didn't stem from political or technical passivity, and it doesn't need to remain passive or static. What that means is up to individuals who actually do it.

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Both Free Software and Open Source Software (commonly abbreviated together as FOSS) does have a established meaning though, authority or not. Starting to include things like "do no evil" in something already established, adds confusion. "Do you mean old FOSS or new FOSS?"

What you can do instead, is to come up with a new term for what you want to describe. So instead of just saying your software has a open source license, say it had a open-but-only-good-users license (whatever that means), so the rest of us don't get confused.

For bonus points, that term already exists; the original article we're commenting on says that they're calling it "ethical source".

I don't think an appreciable amount of confusion is added: there's already a wide range of "approved" open source licenses that impose varying restrictions or requirements on end users, packagers, and potential contributors. AGPL, for example, is materially different in its requirements from Apache-2, and yet both are "open source."

Put another way: it's not clear why the current complexity is okay, but other kinds of complexity (that accurately reflect the current ethical landscape, instead of the ethical landscape of software in the 1990s and 2000s) are not.

> that accurately reflect the current ethical landscape, instead of the ethical landscape of software in the 1990s and 2000s

This seems like it provides exactly the reason why we shouldn't have such a thing. What is the ethical landscape of the 2040s going to look like compared to today?

By that token, we shouldn’t have open source at all, even in the OSI’s approved form. After all, it’s a direct product of a historical ethical landscape, one that shaped our current landscape.

Have you not heard of the OSI? I think they may beg to differ on that.

Of course I've heard of the OSI. I don't understand why I'm particularly bound to their definition of open source, given that both the phrase and the concept predate the OSI, likely by decades.

Why do you care? You have a particular vision of how your software should be able to be used. Why do you care if it's "open source" or not? At least with companies, I understand the reason for marketing purposes to be perceived as open source. I'm not sure I understand why an individual maintainer of a project is so desperate to be seen as being open source if it doesn't conform to their vision.

Why does anybody care about anything? It’s certainly not life or death for me; I guess I feel like it’s an unnecessary restriction of what “open source” could (and maybe even ought to) mean.

I’m not desperate to be perceived any way in the OSS community; I do plenty of work on projects that satisfy the OSI’s definition, and that will never change. But I also don’t see why the work I do, which I do for the public and not for corporations, which is open in the most literal sense of the word, can’t be rightfully called open source.

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