Comment by kstrauser
5 days ago
Its license has strict limitations on what you can use it for.
It’s not open source in any reasonable sense.
5 days ago
Its license has strict limitations on what you can use it for.
It’s not open source in any reasonable sense.
It is open source (the code is right there), but it's not Open Source due to what GP references. There is a distinction.
We're talking in English, not in Go. The meaning doesn't change that much because of using uppercase initials. What you're referring to has already been consolidated as "source available".
I'm not a native speaker, but to me "open" sounds like it fits to the case when I can see the code. Am I speaking in Go?
5 replies →
OFF: Can we do something about this "open source" = "Open Source" usage? I want the opposite, "open source" = "source available" usage, because
I think the "open source" = "Open Source" usage will be a friction point forever if it stays. Can we ..
It's unnecessarily complicating things to require case sensitivity here. Words don't typically completely change their meaning just because of capitalization. And suppose I write that in a Slack channel where no one uses caps at all? Do I have to use caps anyone to make sure I'm not confusing everyone? How do I pronounce it correctly if I'm giving a speech such that listeners know which one I mean? What if the closed captioner writes the case wrong?
Nah. "Open Source" = "open source", because any other interpretation goes against the norms of written and spoken English, and because it'd be an absolute freaking pain in the neck to create that brand new distinction that's not an issue today.
The term should've really been "Libre source" and that would've been very much in line with the idea behind it. Alas, that boat has sailed.
Sure, if you invent a time machine and rewrite how things actually evolved.
Early on, you mostly had only two kinds of code: Proprietary software whose source code is closely guarded as a trade secret, contrasted with open software where the source code is quite deliberately shared with the world as widely as possible. The former was code owned by companies, the latter was generally academics and hobbyists.
It's only somewhat recently that there has been a fairly large gray area between those two, mostly from companies who want to capitalize on the warm fuzzy feels of Open Source in their marketing material while building a moat that doesn't allow others to do much without the missing proprietary bit, or because the license doesn't allow redistribution, to pick to random examples.
That’s not what open source means. That is generally called source available.
Source available sounds like you gotta buy it.
Think of it this way, if you were going to an event and saw 'buffet available' you'd enquire how to access it. If you saw 'open buffet' you'd know it's just there for the taking.
Open source sounds like it's free to view. It's open.
An open house isn't free to own. You view it.
Open source not meaning the source code is free to view but instead having a meaning related to licensing is silly.
Call it an open license, or just name the license. The code/source isn't the license. I'll die on this hill. Christine was cool but that doesn't make her infallible. Open source meaning open license was a mistake.
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I'm not sure the same argument that Facebook's marketing teams use, hold a lot of water on a really programming-heavy forum like this :)
That’s just called „source available“.
But since [oO]pen [sS]ource has a broadly understood meaning that's different, we shouldn't deliberately use the same description for both ideas.
If you want to describe it as "source available", I'll happily go along with it. It's not open source, though. The source is visible, but it's not open to use. I mean, you can find the leaked Windows source code online, but it's not open source just because you can look at it.