Affirmation of the Open Source Definition

&gt; Without this single, standard definition of &quot;open source,&quot; software development as we know it would not be possible. There is no trust in a world where anyone can invent their own definition for open source, and without trust there is no community, no collaboration, and no innovation.<p>Are they saying I can&#x27;t trust what I read in the license files of a project? This is beyond hubris...

Definitions don&#x27;t belong to committees.<p>&quot;open source&quot; isn&#x27;t a trademarked or otherwise protected phrase, it does not belong to the OSI, it is not synonymous with (has an)&quot;open source initiative Approved License&quot;.<p>Coining a term or being among the first to use it does not mean that term belongs to you.<p>There are many people that disagree with the OSI about what &quot;open source&quot; means, and that is what it takes for a definition.<p>There is a certain irony in the OSI talking about open source like they own it.

So this is yet another comments thread where I see numerous people not agreeing with OSI definition of &quot;Open Source&quot; and it got me wondering again, has there always been such a sentiment, or is it a recent one? I don&#x27;t recall seeing it as much even a couple of years ago. Has there been some anti-OSI movement, and if so is there somewhere I could read about arguments against OSI? It seems most comments seem to be boiling down to &quot;you are not going to tell me what I can do&quot; but that&#x27;s perhaps unfair.

I&#x27;m proud to see an organization I&#x27;m active in, the Rensselaer Center for Open Source, on this list! Just last week a representative from the OSI came to my university (RPI) to talk about what it means to be OSI affiliate members.

Isn&#x27;t this what trademarks are for? If they want to enforce what the meaning of a term is in a a given domain they could come up with a new term and trademark it.

A noble effort, but futile in my opinion. Trying to get the tech world to agree on something is like trying to herd cats. It&#x27;s not going to work. What&#x27;s to prevent another organization(s) from &quot;forking&quot; their own definition of open source. And good luck trying to get the differing major license camps ( MIT, GNU, etc ) to agree on anything.

Count us (Fogbeam Labs) in! The OSD is the de facto definition of Open Source, and we&#x27;re proud to back the OSI on this.

&quot;Open source&quot; is just English words you can look up in a dictionary; it can mean any number of things.<p>If we disconnect one end of a field effect transistor, the one opposite to the &quot;drain&quot;, we have an &quot;open source&quot;.

&quot;open source&quot; is just two words. &quot;open&quot; and &quot;source&quot;, the latter being short for source code. I hate to break it to you, but language does not work by having people sign statements to declare that you think certain words can only be used in certain contexts that you think are worthy of your cause.<p>The people signing such statements are wasting their time. Their signature does not, and cannot prevent people from using &quot;open&quot; and &quot;source&quot; together, to mean something where the source code is open for inspection, if it doesn&#x27;t quite fit their over-engineered definition.<p>&quot;open source&quot; and &quot;OSI approved&quot; are simply not synonymous and hopeful wishing will never make it so.