Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The thing is, HN is a technical audience, not an average person in this regard.

People here know the difference or are easily able to understand it if they haven't been confronted with it.



>People here know the difference or are easily able to understand it if they haven't been confronted with it.

No. They're trying to force a definition of open-source that does not exist to make it FOSS because FOSS people want everything to be FOSS so try to pressure people into it.

The definition is defined by dictionaries and it's different from what is said on here. Quite simply, they're wrong. They want it to mean one thing however the definition of the word by Oxford and Webster applies to what is done in that repo. It is open-source by the definition of the word by people who define and clarify words and not by FOSS devs who want everything to be FOSS. It is open-source! And the fact, people on here don't know that shows people on here don't know the difference.


People who develop software have to understand what "open source" means (technically, not just some sloppy interpretation), because using a non-open-source package in an otherwise open source project can contaminate the whole thing. License violations can pose high risks, both financial and reputation losses.

Because of that, a lot of effort goes into helping make sure that software stacks are using consistent licenses. There's a whole industry of standards, audit processes, software and companies to help with this; for example, see:

https://licensehawk.com/software-license-compliance-audits/

https://spdx.org/licenses/

https://www.flexera.com/products/flexnet-manager


People who develop software have to understand the difference between FOSS and Open-Source. We already have a term for what you want to describe as open-source, it's called FOSS.

Words have meanings they're collected and recorded in dictionaries, these are the source of truth for the definition of words. It's important that we have them so we can all talk and know what we mean. This is at the very core of languages.

This open source has to be FOSS is some straight-up bullshit by people who spend all their time in the FOSS community.

By every definition other than the FOSS community, this is open source. That is a fact.

Btw: FOSS means Free and Open Source Software. Even the FOSS community fundamentally says that open source does not neet to be free.


We all know the difference and the difference here is enormous.


Says it is open source but not FOSS is just silly. You know what the OSS part of FOSS stands for right?


>It is open-source!

No, it's not. Please read number 5, it might enlighten you to what people colloquially consider open source, which didn't have a dictionary definition until technical people started using this definition: https://opensource.org/osd

>And the fact, people on here don't know that shows people on here don't know the difference.

..What? Do you know what OSS vs FOSS is?


OSD is god and gets to prescribe what is and is not open source? Says who?


The whole idea is that we need a definition that everyone agrees With. The OSD is what the software community at large agreed, so any licences that claim to be open-source are compared to that.


This doesn't match the Webster's definition either. If your response to that is "there are no gods anyways" then you've earned yourself a chuckle.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: