I hate the recent open-source rise

jjamietanna about 5 hours ago 11 commentsRead Article on jvt.me

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Discussion (11 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dataflow•about 3 hours ago

What a weird hill to choose to die on. I wasn't even aware of the trend, but I love it now that I'm aware of it; it makes total sense.

If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.

If you're a descriptivist, then why are is OSI getting a monopoly on everyone's vocabulary? You should be happy to let people use whatever term however they want. You know, freedom and all. You still don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.

MW also thinks it's hyphenated, but what do they know, right? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source

evanelias•about 1 hour ago

Totally agreed. They don't have a trademark, and their superfans have no right to tell people how to capitalize or punctuate the term.

I also get the sense that the author has an inherently negative view of non-OSI-approved "source available" licenses -- and in particular the Business Source License, which he uses as a counterexample twice.

Yet, OSI cofounder Bruce Perens helped improve that license and specifically said "I feel it’s worthy of my endorsement. The new BSL will be a good way for developers to get paid while eventually making their works Open Source." [1]

Why do so many vocal people in the Open Source world have a much more extreme worldview than even an OSI cofounder?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250629110730/https://perens.co...

jamietanna•37 minutes ago

I personally prefer Free Software (FSF-approved) or Open Source (OSI-approved) licenses, but I also agree that there is a place for other licenses. It's better that there's space for kinda-open, rather than it being open vs completely closed repositories.

I've previously worked at a company using an "open source" license (Elastic, with the ELv2) and have enjoyed having to explain the difference to folks between what it meant to be "open source" vs "Open Source", and the fact that a lot of folks generally don't understand the difference and some of the nuance. Mentioning the BuSL was because it's something a lot more folks may be aware of, i.e. given Hashicorp's recent relicense (as with other companies in recent years)

Sustainability is hard, and having different ways to describe this is good! But it's a lot harder when people don't understand why something calling itself "open source" when it's "but you can't run it if you're a company" is bad

evanelias•24 minutes ago

> I also agree that there is a place for other licenses. It's better that there's space for kinda-open, rather than it being open vs completely closed repositories.

That's good to hear, sincere apologies for assuming otherwise. There are a lot of folks on HN who take a much more extreme view there, and I seem to have incorrectly conflated them in the "open source" vs "Open Source" debate.

> having to explain the difference to folks between what it meant to be "open source" vs "Open Source", and the fact that a lot of folks generally don't understand the difference and some of the nuance

This speaks to the core naming problem though: the original OSI folks should have picked a better term! They thought "Free Software" wasn't a good term in part due to the gratis vs freedom confusion (totally agreed here), and yet they picked another equally-confusing term to use instead, that had a pre-existing generic meaning which wasn't related to specific license terms in any way.

Macha•about 2 hours ago

> If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.

Honestly all of these exist in both hyphenated and unhyphenated usage in my experience and for long term and user friendly I’d guess unhyphenated gets more usage

dataflow•about 1 hour ago

>> If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works.

> Honestly all of these exist in both hyphenated and unhyphenated usage in my experience

...which is descriptive, not prescriptive.

cjs_ac•about 3 hours ago

The hyphenation probably stems from the fact that, grammatically, 'open-source' is a compound adjective. The LLMs are probably weighting this over the nature of 'open source' as jargon.

edg5000•about 3 hours ago

Commercial, paid: You must pay money, you get access to service or a binary, or something in between. No source code released.

Shareware: You get to download and use the binary for free. Parts of it are missing, you must pay to receive a copy of it. (DOOM, WinRAR, Duke Nukem)

Freeware: Binaries are free to use and distribute, complete functionality. Source code not published. (Adobe Acrobat Reader, Draw.io, IrfanView, Google Earth Pro)

Open-source: The source code is openly available. Sometimes development also happens in the open. (PHP, Apache HTTPD, Linux, GCC)

Open weights: AI model weights released including inference, tokenizer code and chat template. Some info released about how it was made. Training dataset and taining code NOT published. Crawler, scraper, book piracy, distillation methods: NOT published.

turtleyacht•about 5 hours ago

What instead? If not free software, then maybe ONF software: Open{- }source is Not Free.

jamietanna•about 4 hours ago

I think using `open source`, and clarifying that it includes non-OSI-approved licenses could work.

Alternatively, "source available" is a term that's been used to imply the source is there, but it's not "open source" (which led to the Fair Source folks working on their own naming for it, so as some folks have negative views of "source available")

turtleyacht•about 4 hours ago

What has stuck with me is the phrase "free and open source," which is like, if the two were equivalent, there wouldn't be a need for the distinction.

Maybe that was when software binaries could be free but the source was not.

GuB-42•about 3 hours ago

There are two big organizations: FSF (Free Software Foundation) and OSI (Open Source Initiative), and while they have similar ideas, they disagree on the details. Free software is more in line with the ideas of the FSF (more idealistic), while open source is more in line with the idea of the OSI (more pragmatic).

There is also the term "libre" (meaning "free as in freedom") to distinguish it from software that doesn't cost money.

cperciva•about 3 hours ago

F/OSS is like GNU/Linux; the second part is the part which matters, but the first part keeps getting pushed by noisy people so we put up with it to keep them happy.

jamietanna•about 4 hours ago

Hah, yes very true!

If you've not read up on the background between the two - I'd very much recommend it (and sorry if I'm re-explaining something you understand)

With Free Software, it's "free as in freedom", not "free as in gratis". Free Software is generally a bit more strongly biased towards the users of a piece of software, but as businesses started to use it they were a bit unhappy with that, so Open Source came to reduce that a little bit, making it easier for companies to use it, without as many strong protections for a user