this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
111 points (79.7% liked)
Open Source
31250 readers
324 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's the FSF definition. Most users and developers of open source do not care at all about that, and certainly do not care about protecting corporate right to use their software without giving back.
To many of them, open source is about transparency, community driven development, open contribution model, forkability, etc.
no, thats also the open source definition point 6: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.
A license that reatricts use would be a "source-availible" license aka corporate bs "work for me for free" licenses.
Also, with strong copyleft licenses, businesses must give back, namely when expanding the program. I think thats what many programmers like about open-source and free software. And yeah, a free software license is a precondition to bazaar style development.
Correction: the definition of open source by a specific organization, the OSI.
I don't remember voting or appointing the OSI as our legitimate representative. But you know who did? Corporations like Amazon, Google, Bloomberg, and many of them: https://opensource.org/sponsors
I do not subscribe to a definition from such an organization, just because it has open source in the name.
The people who coined the term "open source" are the same people who founded OSI. If you don't like their term, don't use it.
I have two arguments: first, it's not true that the OSI coined the term. But more importantly, it isn't even important if it was true. What matters is the context in which the open source movement emerged, and how people who use the term think of it.
The open source / free software movement was born in universities who primarily wanted to erase the barriers on collaboration between them, and wanted to follow an open model. They grew frustrated of the proprietary and opaque model of software written by major corporations. They could not use it. So they decided to write their own free software and combine their efforts to not rely on corporate or proprietary software.
Back then, corporations were uninterested in open source. In fact they were hostile to it and wanted it to die. The issue that we deal with today of corporations leeching on open source did not exist, so the fact that the movement did not specifically fight this does not mean they're okay with it. The corporate hostility took a different form and that's what they combatted.
On OSI coining the term, the OSI themselves claim it was coined by Christine Peterson. They do not claim that they founded the term, nor that the founder had an affiliation with them: https://opensource.org/history