Comment by Aurornis

16 hours ago

> “Open source” can mean

Keyword being "can"

The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself

13 comments

Aurornis

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Wowfunhappy  14 hours ago

You and Bigstrat2003 are arguing a technicality, and you're technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point. Skrebbel and Layer8 are focused on the cultural associations of "open source" development, and this mismatch is causing everyone to talk past each other.

The original post in this thread was:

> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.

Skrebbel probably shouldn't have said that Carmack "doesn't really do OSS", but what they clearly meant was, Carmack doesn't participate in the sort of community development as the Linux kernel or Apache or whatever.

  • aeonfox  12 hours ago

    More succinctly, Carmack only contributes his code to OSS, but not his time, and shouldn't impose his values on the wider community that contribute both.

    > technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point

    Talking past people to argue on semantics and pedantry is a HN pastime. It may even be it's primary function.

    • ineedasername  10 hours ago

      >“Primary” function

      If that was the intent don’t you think it would be stated somewhere, or in the faq?

      >“Talking” past

      It’s only text, there’s no talking past. You can’t talk past someone when the conversation isn’t spoken. At best, you might ignore what they write and go on and on and on at some length on your own point instead, ever meandering further from the words you didn’t read, widening the scope of the original point to include the closest topic that isn’t completely orthogonal to the one at hand, like the current tendency to look for the newest pattern of LLM output in everyone’s’ comments in an attempt to root out all potential AI generated responses. And eventually exhaust all of their rhetoric and perhaps, just maybe, in the very end, get to the

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layer8  16 hours ago

I’m saying that “open source” can mean both things. The parent was arguing that it only means the licensing. I’m not arguing that it always means the development model.

> The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself

By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.

Note that the Wikipedia page for “open-source software” [2] states: “Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite”. That would really only be the case in the context of open-source development.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software