Posted by Brajeshwar 1 day ago
Externally done to give a kick to sales efforts.
And internally done in an attempt to get someone with AI resources to build blatantly non-AI functions by sticking then onto something with no or very little genuine AI angle.
It's just a very wide category that is basically meaningless nowadays because it applies to everything.
Marketers are even restrained in using it, because applying it everywhere it could go would sound insane and cringe. But it is a technical term, that technically applies to all those things people put it on.
personally, I think the term should be avoided if its not what the open source community has made a culture around
but I cant say its weasely corporate “open washing”, either. because its the open source community that appropriated the term to mean a subset of free, open, commercial use licenses and everything digital thats necessary to replicate the product, not the other way around where corporations are suddenly using some legalese to turn it into a marketing term thats technically okay
This is historical revisionism, and it's especially terrible that you'd call people "weasels" for correcting it. The term "open source" (as applied to software) was in-use prior to the existence of the OSI, and that's explicitly why the OSI wasn't able to obtain a trademark on the term. The term meant something roughly equivalent to how we use "source available" today.
Read https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part... for a really good deep-dive into the prior usage of the term.
It's not my blog post, so you don't have to take my word for it. But if you disagree with that post author's findings, perhaps you could indicate what you disagree with. The post extensively links citations/sources.
> does this make it reasonable to claim, today, that we can call something “Open Source” if it isn’t OSI-approved?
OSI isn't the boss of me, and I see no reason to let them dictate the meaning of terminology that they didn't invent and don't hold a trademark for. The two main founders of OSI also haven't been involved with it for quite some time, and besides, one of them regularly makes politically-charged comments that I find repulsive. Why exactly are we putting this random small non-profit on a pedestal?
Personally, I stick to "source available" when referring to non-OSI licenses, but that's strictly to avoid getting shouted at by people who inexplicably treat the OSD like a holy law from the almighty. I think the industry would be a lot healthier if we avoided these extreme views.
> Only weasels try to claim otherwise; i.e. the only people I see doing it are weasels who are trying to defend the indefensible by arguing the definition of words.
It sure sounds like you think anyone who disagrees with your point of view is a weasel, even if they have a well-researched reason for the disagreement!
Even if there were some usage of “Open Source” prior to the OSI, the OSI announcement and consequent media storm completely obliterated any prior meaning the term might have had.
> OSI isn't the boss of me
What reason can you have to use the term “Open Source” today to mean something other than what OSI defines, other than to weaselly mislead?
In any case, OSI didn't create this term, they were denied a trademark on it, and they didn't actually create any of these licenses. They aren't the government, and they aren't the dictionary. The default state of affairs is to not care about their definition. You need to give reasons why we should care about their arbitrary definition. A "media storm" is just a marketing campaign, and that hardly seems like a good reason for an entire industry to strictly follow something.
I'm especially disturbed by how some strict adherents of the OSD seem to go out of their way to attack non-FOSS licenses and the software authors who adopt them. The negative comments on the recent Fair Source threads here seem to indicate that any attempt to adopt non-OSD source-available licensing will be attacked as "open washing", even if the authors don't use the word "open".
I don't understand why people feel justified to act as self-appointed Terminology Police on behalf of an arbitrary definition from a random small nonprofit. This is cult-like behavior.
There can be less genetic differences between people from (for example) Asia and Africa vs actual family members.
But feel like the intent of the word was very much not vague. It was initially just about the optical differences between people that were born in different areas of the world - which are/were very easy to discern ~150 yrs ago when it extremely rare for "interracial" offspring.
But that's mostly down to people being people and not caring about these differences at large. Give it a few hundred years and these physical differences such as skin color, average body sizes etc will have gone away, too. At least I think they will.
So I feel that this is a great example of another word that's become so charged with political meaning that the origins meaning has been lost or at least changed along the way. And it continues to lose it with every kid that has parents of varying origin