Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

From Wikipedia:

>In 1998, the essay helped the final push for Netscape Communications Corporation to release the source code for Netscape Communicator and start the Mozilla project; it was cited by Frank Hecker and other employees as an outside independent validation of his arguments.

Netscape's public recognition of this influence brought Raymond renown in hacker culture.

Respectfully, this definition of "open-source" does not match common use, even with a loose colloquial interpretation in mind. As commonly understood, an "open-source" license requires the ability to acquire the source, and to modify it, and to redistribute it.

Your definition, quoted above, would call open-source a license that allowed for personal modifications to source but forbade redistribution of those modifications. Your definition would also call open-source a license that required all modifications of the source to be made through a single point of central control. I think both of these cases fail even loose understandings of what "Open Source/open-source" is. I do think they both describe "source available".

You draw a distinction between "open-source" as a colloquial term and "Open Source" as defined by the OSI, but I don't think this isn't very compelling or useful. Sure, language evolves and people use terms incorrectly all the time, but that doesn't make erroneous use correct. In particular, "Open Source" is used as a legal criteria for a set of software licenses, so precision in its definition is important. Also, I have not personally come across any cases where there was any material difference between colloquial use of the term open-source and precise definition of Open Source as defined by the OSI. Do you have anything to cite that justifies a distinction here?

So I beg you to reconsider the idea that the OSI is "some organization who just decided to name themselves after the term" and the idea that "Open Source" is a term "defined loosely by how people use it." In point of historical fact, the term was first used by the people behind the organization, who formed it to popularize it as a new concept, and an alternative to "Free Software": https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso.... The OSI is not some organization formed to co-opt and redefine the term for their own purposes after it was already in common use.

I do agree with you that often times people think of specific project management structures when talking about open-source development. I.e. the debates about what makes for a successful open-source project, cultivating a community, making it easy for community members to contribute, etc. There can be non-open-source projects using open-source development methodologies, sure, but it doesn't make them "open-source" even in a colloquial sense. The sole criteria is always the license granted to users of the software.

The folks who coined the term were among those that led the OSI.

> The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code. The strategy session grew from a realization that the attention around the Netscape announcement had created an opportunity to educate and advocate for the superiority of an open development process.

> Two of those present at the Palo Alto meeting (Eric Raymond and Michael Tiemann) would later serve as presidents of OSI, and other attendees (including Todd Andersen, Jon “maddog” Hall, Larry Augustin, and Sam Ockman) became key early supporters of the organization.

These folks went on to create the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/docs/osd

The folks who created the term started an organization named after the term, created an official definition, and registered the domain. If that's not enough for us to have an official definition, what does it take? And what do we gain by arguing about this? Reading your posts in this thread (and elsewhere), my impression is that you're invested in insisting that "open source" doesn't have that definition, but I can't figure out what your motivation is.

FWIW, my motivation is to create an environment where terms have precise meaning so we can discuss complex issues (like copyright, licensing, development models, etc.) effectively. If we're wrangling over terms and language all the time, communication becomes much more difficult.