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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

Citation? Wikipedia would appreciate your contribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

> Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski, and Eric Raymond [...] > At that meeting, alternatives to the term "free software" were discussed. [...] Raymond argued for "open source. The assembled developers took a vote, and the winner was announced at a press conference the same evening

The original "Open source Definition" was derived from Debian's Social Contract, which did not use the term "open source"

https://web.archive.org/web/20140328095107/http://www.debian...

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Citation? Wikipedia would appreciate your contribution.

It's not hard to find earlier examples where the phrase is used to describe enabling and (yes) leveraging community contributions to accomplish things that otherwise wouldn't be practical; see my other post for a couple of those.

But then people will rightfully object that the term "Open Source", when used in a capacity related to journalistic or intelligence-gathering activities, doesn't have anything to do with software licensing. Even if OSI had trademarked the phrase, which they didn't, that shouldn't constrain its use in another context.

To which I'd counter that this statement is equally true when discussing AI models. We are going to have to completely rewire copyright law from the ground up to deal with this. Flame wars over what "Open Source" means or who has the right to use the phrase are going to look completely inconsequential by the time the dust settles.

I'll concede that "open source" may mean other things in other contexts. For example, an open source river may mean something in particular to those who study rivers. This thread was not talking about a new context, it was not even talking about the weights of a machine learning model or the licensing of training data, it was talking about the licensing of the code in a particular GitHub repository, llama3.

AI may make copyright obsolete, or it may make copyright more important than ever, but my prediction is that the IT community will lose something of great value if the term "open source" is diluted to include licenses that restrict usage, restrict distribution, and restrict modification. I can understand why people may want to choose somewhat restrictive licenses, just like I can understand why a product may contain gelatin, but I don't like it when the product is mis-labelled as vegan. There are plenty of other terms that could be used, for example, "open" by itself. I'm honestly curious if you would defend a pork product labelled as vegan, or do you just feel that the analogy doesn't apply?

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