> After all, software could not be both open and closed.<p>It turns out software can be both open and closed, and it's a good approach IMHO: the software creator can provide an open source license and a closed source license. Then users can choose the license that's best for their purposes.<p>This approach is currently playing out with some for-profit software companies that want to offer open source to end users, yet don't want to enable direct competitors (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon) or do want to enable for-pay customers to bypass sharing work (e.g. I write GPL software, and one of my regulated-industry customers prefers to pay for a proprietary license rather than use GPL).
A huge blogpost just to rant that neither OSI nor a large part of the public think that the license he likes to use to discriminate across lines of businesses could be labeled "Open Source".<p>Just call your thing "source available" or make up your own special club and stop complaining you don't get the same treatment than licenses that don't discriminate people.<p>Or you know, decide who has to/doesn't have to share code without caring about what the product that's building upon your software is about or who's building it. Like the rest of us who actually care about Open Source beyond using it as a PR tool for your business.
> <i>In the new manner of speaking, this means open source has “won”. Nearly all software is open source, in the sense that it builds on open source, uses open source tools, relies on open source infrastructure, and loudly proclaims how awesome all this free stuff is for business.</i><p>I prefer FOSS vastly, yet the substantial majority of the software I interact with daily is nonfree (not "open source" in the parlance of TFA).<p>Cars, telephones, Uber, App Store, Google, YouTube, streaming services, payment cards, cameras, thermostats, light bulbs... almost all software is proprietary these days.
I've always disliked the term "open source" because it's vague and nobody can agree on a definition. I think we'd all spend a lot less time arguing over definitions if people just used more specific descriptions like "copyleft", "source available", "permissive license"
With my "I'm not a native speaker, but I'm a pedant" hat on, I feel like the author doesn't seem to distinguish between two of the meanings of the word discrimination[1]:<p>> 1. (Sociology) unfair treatment of a person, racial group, minority, etc; action based on prejudice<p>> 3. the ability to see fine distinctions and differences<p>It's fine to make distinctions between FOSS fearing developers and evil source developers, but I'm pretty sure that's not what the OSI means.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thefreedictionary.com/discrimination" rel="nofollow">https://www.thefreedictionary.com/discrimination</a>