alt Hacker News> If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades.
If I’ve learned anything from reading HN comments, it’s that “open source” means different things to different people, including those who believe themselves to have specific knowledge of the history of the topic.
There are half a dozen different claims about the original meaning of “open source” in this comment section alone. They’re coming from people citing history and notable figures from open source past.
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Not at all. There are some people who want open source to mean something else than it does because they want the positive publicity that comes with the term without the commitments to user freedom. Those people should not be given any weight.
Yeah, and all but one of those claims is incorrect.
"Open source" is not just a turn of phrase which became common over time. The phrase was coined by the founders of the Open Source Initiative, and it has always had a very specific meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative
People who seem to think that "open source" has a variety of meanings, are probably confusing it for "free software" which does indeed have a variety of meanings (which was the whole reason the phrase "open source" was created - because "free software" was too vague, and they wanted to create a term with a single, specific definition!)