Comment by bruce511

The problem with your analogy is that open source has a definition. As does public domain. As do elephants and bananas.

In your analogy we're not the ones calling elephants bananas, you are. We want to keep calling one bananas and the other elephants. You are suggesting that since elephants are similar to bananas you can simply use either word.

Legally, Open Source and Public Domain are -very- different animals. Open Source comes eith a copyright, and a license (which has requirements), public domain does not.

Of course public domain and open source are both "shipped as source code". Then again so is a fair bit of proprietary software. That doesn't make it open source either.