I hate the recent open-source rise | Hacker News Reader

I hate the recent open-source rise

jvt.me

16 pointsjamietanna27 comments

What a weird hill to choose to die on. I wasn't even aware of the trend, but I love it now that I'm aware of it; it makes total sense.

If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.

If you're a descriptivist, then why are is OSI getting a monopoly on everyone's vocabulary? You should be happy to let people use whatever term however they want. You know, freedom and all. You still don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.

MW also thinks it's hyphenated, but what do they know, right? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source

> If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.

Honestly all of these exist in both hyphenated and unhyphenated usage in my experience and for long term and user friendly I’d guess unhyphenated gets more usage

>> If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works.

> Honestly all of these exist in both hyphenated and unhyphenated usage in my experience

...which is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Totally agreed. They don't have a trademark, and their superfans have no right to tell people how to capitalize or punctuate the term.

I also get the sense that the author has an inherently negative view of non-OSI-approved "source available" licenses -- and in particular the Business Source License, which he uses as a counterexample twice.

Yet, OSI cofounder Bruce Perens helped improve that license and specifically said "I feel it’s worthy of my endorsement. The new BSL will be a good way for developers to get paid while eventually making their works Open Source." [1]

Why do so many vocal people in the Open Source world have a much more extreme worldview than even an OSI cofounder?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250629110730/https://perens.co...

I personally prefer Free Software (FSF-approved) or Open Source (OSI-approved) licenses, but I also agree that there is a place for other licenses. It's better that there's space for kinda-open, rather than it being open vs completely closed repositories.

I've previously worked at a company using an "open source" license (Elastic, with the ELv2) and have enjoyed having to explain the difference to folks between what it meant to be "open source" vs "Open Source", and the fact that a lot of folks generally don't understand the difference and some of the nuance. Mentioning the BuSL was because it's something a lot more folks may be aware of, i.e. given Hashicorp's recent relicense (as with other companies in recent years)

Sustainability is hard, and having different ways to describe this is good! But it's a lot harder when people don't understand why something calling itself "open source" when it's "but you can't run it if you're a company" is bad

> I also agree that there is a place for other licenses. It's better that there's space for kinda-open, rather than it being open vs completely closed repositories.

That's good to hear, sincere apologies for assuming otherwise. There are a lot of folks on HN who take a much more extreme view there, and I seem to have incorrectly conflated them in the "open source" vs "Open Source" debate.

> having to explain the difference to folks between what it meant to be "open source" vs "Open Source", and the fact that a lot of folks generally don't understand the difference and some of the nuance

This speaks to the core naming problem though: the original OSI folks should have picked a better term! They thought "Free Software" wasn't a good term in part due to the gratis vs freedom confusion (totally agreed here), and yet they picked another equally-confusing term to use instead, that had a pre-existing generic meaning which wasn't related to specific license terms in any way.

> Why do so many vocal people in the Open Source world have a much more extreme worldview than even an OSI cofounder?

In my experience talking with many such people over decades... it's usually some type of personality disorder. I quit FOSS because of how prevalent this egotistical dogmatism persona is.

Besides the users that never stop complaining and love to make absurd demands of unpaid volunteers, a very depressingly-large number of other developers you end up working with are so self-absorbed and uninterested in actually getting along with other people that their only means of discussion is always about how everyone else is wrong and there can be no other valid opinions.

The hyphenation probably stems from the fact that, grammatically, 'open-source' is a compound adjective. The LLMs are probably weighting this over the nature of 'open source' as jargon.

There is no such thing as "correct" or "incorrect" hyphenation, or for that matter "correct English". Source: linguists

> Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. ... Rather, what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion.

Author:

> John McWhorter, contributing editor at The New Republic and columnist for The New York Daily News, teaches linguistics, American studies and Western civilization at Columbia University. His latest book is “What Language Is, What It Isn’t and What It Could Be.”

https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...

What instead? If not free software, then maybe ONF software: Open{- }source is Not Free.

I think using `open source`, and clarifying that it includes non-OSI-approved licenses could work.

Alternatively, "source available" is a term that's been used to imply the source is there, but it's not "open source" (which led to the Fair Source folks working on their own naming for it, so as some folks have negative views of "source available")

What has stuck with me is the phrase "free and open source," which is like, if the two were equivalent, there wouldn't be a need for the distinction.

Maybe that was when software binaries could be free but the source was not.

Hah, yes very true!

If you've not read up on the background between the two - I'd very much recommend it (and sorry if I'm re-explaining something you understand)

With Free Software, it's "free as in freedom", not "free as in gratis". Free Software is generally a bit more strongly biased towards the users of a piece of software, but as businesses started to use it they were a bit unhappy with that, so Open Source came to reduce that a little bit, making it easier for companies to use it, without as many strong protections for a user