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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • It has evolved of cause. One of the sources you referred to, the OSI, has a clear agenda to define the term open source software according to their own definition. They are advocating that we use the term in the more narrow sense as you described, rather than the more original broad sense.

    The Wikipedia article basically just cites OSIs definition. If you dig into the talk page on Wikipedia it is clearly a disbuted definition that is currently written.

    While I absolutely am a proponent of free, libre or open source software, no matter what we call it, the narrow definition OSI suggests of open source software is still not how most people understand the term.

    Narrowing the term open source software the way OSI proposes increases the confusion, it doesn’t help.


  • You are cherry-picking quite a bit in that Wikipedia article. There is also a whole section discussing the confusion between the terms open source, free and libre.

    I would venture that the most commonly understood definition of the term is that open source software simply means what it says, that the source code is openly available. And nothing more.

    Free or libre software expresses the intention you describe explicitly, that the recipient is allowed to share and modify the software. Thus removing ambiguity.

    Open Source is indeed a term existing for many years, probably a lot longer than you are thinking about. Trying to redefine that as meaning anything more than what is says is what is causing confusion.