I certainly learned some things today. I didn’t realise ‘open source’ had such a specific meaning, and I understand why it’s useful to establish the definition so there is no ambiguity.
Reading the replies to this thread is like watching hippies fight over the definition of free love.
Open source doesn’t mean anything unless we all agree on one definition, and while idealistic developers might reject the idea of central authorities to uphold the meaning of things now, they forget that it was idealistic developers just like them that realised an agreed definition was required and established the OSI 20 years ago to uphold it.
The OSI is not the man telling you what you can and can’t do - a shared and agreed definition of what open source is clearly benefits all of us, and if you just invent your own definition through ignorance or sheer bloody mindedness then you’re not legally in the wrong, but you could find yourself embarassed, exploited, or otherwise screwed through not understanding what the consensus definition is.
We are arguing over rather or not a body saying they haven't reviewed rather or not something fits a definition qualifies as not fitting that definition.
The answer is no, it does not, hence why OSI's statement is inaccurate.
The Open Source Definition is plenty ambiguous. It's not even internally consistent. Read the introduction, which sets us up for rules about license terms, and then criterion 2, which talks about source availability. What LICENSE says for the binary doesn't guarantee the distributor source.
That doesn't mean OSD was bunk or busted. It means we've preserved it for historical relevance, not operative function. Else we'd've revised a great deal more in 20 years.
Instead, in discussion of new license submissions, we routinely see readings of OSD criteria that would exclude the very set of contemporaneous, popular licenses the original Debian Free Software Definition was meant to generalize. For example, that criterion 6 prohibits discrimination against proprietary development as a field of endeavor. OSD isn't a consensus, exactly because it invites so many such readings. There's consensus only insofar as interest groups agree to disagree in OSD terms, as a framework. Some don't. Notably FSF, with its own "definition".
The trouble with open source is that it's a movement, a community idea, not an entry in any formal lexicon, not a fixed point. License terms are only incidental to that movement, that community idea. A zeitgeist and a name. And there's nothing particularly legal about OSD criteria, apart from the expectation they'll be implemented in the legal medium of public license terms. Legal's no magic font of rigor here.
As I'm led to believe, "Free Love" never suffered such discipline as OSI claims now. Free Love was something people were into, stood for, practiced. There was never any organization proffering a definition of Free Love as definitive, official in some sense, and telling folks their particular love didn't count, wasn't free enough. "Free Love" meant something because of how it was used and understood, variously, not how it was defined. It was always contested, and contestable.
Pretending that the OSD, or more accurately OSI approval, represents consensus for new proposals clearly benefits only those who like the particular status quo that a select subset wish to preserve by clout right now. Circa 2002, OSI was approving plenty of licenses in the vein of Mongo's new terms, to welcome smaller businesses challenging more powerful incumbents on behalf of the open approach. Notably RPL and QFPL and Watcom. The permissive-industrial complex hastens to elide or deprecate those approvals now. Even though today very arguably wasn't reachable without accepting strong reciprocal licenses for dual licensors, as a waystation.
Reading the replies to this thread is like watching hippies fight over the definition of free love.
Open source doesn’t mean anything unless we all agree on one definition, and while idealistic developers might reject the idea of central authorities to uphold the meaning of things now, they forget that it was idealistic developers just like them that realised an agreed definition was required and established the OSI 20 years ago to uphold it.
The OSI is not the man telling you what you can and can’t do - a shared and agreed definition of what open source is clearly benefits all of us, and if you just invent your own definition through ignorance or sheer bloody mindedness then you’re not legally in the wrong, but you could find yourself embarassed, exploited, or otherwise screwed through not understanding what the consensus definition is.