Comment by evanelias
6 hours ago
> open source should not imply open community, even if that's what the originators of the movement intended.
I'd take this a step further and say the intention of the originators of the movement is somewhat irrelevant, because that movement essentially retconned a bunch of pre-existing licenses and concepts.
Consider the MIT license, which is OSI-approved but substantially predates the "open source movement" (as do many other popular OSI-approved licenses). This license was created not to foster collaboration, but rather simply to avoid legal overhead for software that wasn't expected to have much financial value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#History
Nowadays, because this license meets the OSD and is OSI-approved, people like GP come across any MIT licensed project and inherently assume the developers are part of the "open source movement" and should follow its social contract. Frankly, that's just BS and we should call it out accordingly: license choice alone does not logically imply anything about following a social movement.
I suppose, but I like to call my software "open source," and it's a little hard to use their name but argue I'm not "one of them."
Granted I only use the term for lack of a better one, I actually prefer calling it Free Software when I'm around people who know the difference. The problem is that it's confusing for everyone else, since I do think it's fine to charge money for my "free software."
> it's a little hard to use their name but argue I'm not "one of them."
That's fair, but personally I can't see any reasonable fault with using "open source" in a way that strictly follows the definition in the OSD, and not this intangible unwritten social norm / movement stuff. If they wanted that to be a core part of it, it should have been in their definition to begin with.
And even religiously following their definition for licensing is a bit ridiculous, because they didn't actually invent the term in the first place. Originally, "open" source code was generically understood to mean "the source code is available" without any implications about licensing, let alone community or social norms. For a lot of irrefutable evidence around this, see https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part...
So the OSI folks took this previously-generic term and popularized their definition for it, creating a movement around it. They even attempted to trademark it, and were explicitly rejected due to the term being too descriptive/generic.
Nonetheless, I personally avoid calling software "open source" if it uses a non-OSI-approved "source available" license, but that's purely because the many OSI zealots are very vocal, and they defend the term purely through social pressure.