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> I personally prefer to be effective at communication, so I don't just use words to mean something different than what everyone else thinks.

And “what everyone else thinks” is mostly different from the OSI definition.



> And “what everyone else thinks” is mostly different from the OSI definition.

Sorry, I meant: "everyone else except 3 or 4 people on ycombinator"


Ask a random person on GitHub how they would define “open source”. I highly doubt they'll mention the OSI.


GitHub itself uses the OSI definition in its ReadME guide to open source:

> Many people think that Open Source simply means availability of the source code of a project, but that does only tell part of the whole story.

> The Open Source Initiative (OSI) provides a commonly accepted definition of what constitutes Open Source. To summarize that, in order to be constituted Open Source,

>> a work has to allow free redistribution,

>> the source code needs to be made available,

>> it must be possible to create further works based on it,

>> there must be no limitations of who may use the work or for what purpose (so something like "no commercial use" or "no military use" won't fly with Open Source),

>> the work must not require an additional license on top of the one it comes with,

>> and finally, the license must not depend on a specific distribution format, technology or presence of other works.

> So, you see, it goes way beyond "the source code is available", in fact, a whole lot more requirements are stated that must be fulfilled in order for a work to really be considered Open Source.

https://github.com/readme/guides/open-source-licensing

Also, GitHub's most starred repo is freeCodeCamp (359k stars - https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp). Linked right in the repo's README, freeCodeCamp defines open source as:

> Open Source Software is code that is publicly available for people to view, modify, and share.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-open-source-softwa...




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