Comment by jraph

> See my post where I say it's not a bright line.

I know you are stating this, but I don't agree.

The human aspects, the diverse and vibrant community that has formed around open source over the past 40 years are key, I just think that we should cleanly separate the concepts.

A piece of software is open source if and only if it's released under an open source license. It's necessary and sufficient. Also "source available" is necessary but not sufficient.

Then we can and should talk about how and why open source and free software appeared, and the other social aspects around open source and free software and how they are crucial.

I'm not stating that the whole thing is not important (clearly, it is), it's just that keeping the concepts separate and clean helps communicating clearly.

My stance is already mostly not technical actually. I would push for free software and the human rights it embodies way more than open source despite open source and free software concerning mostly the same actual software. The tools (licenses) are mostly the same, but the intent and the approach can be very different.

Even the open source definition and the free software definitions are tools. They must remain clear and simple to be useful and powerful.

If you mix everything, we can talk about nothing.

There are many ways to develop open source software, including alone from a garage by throwing the source code out of the window without never looking outside. If you make the community aspect part of the open source definition, you break this.