The « open source » confusion #311

Hello everyone,

I just discovered this open educational resource (OER) on « open source » following the Open Source Initiative reaction on the teaching open source mailing list (see osi-mail.txt), I thought it could be an opportunity to add some insight to fuel a questioning on the meaning of open source. Disclaimer, I am opposed to the Open Source "Definition", a reason that motivates this message.

The Open Source Definition dissensus

This is very wrong, especially since you capitalize Open Source Software. That's a term of art, universally recognized by industry and even by legislators around the world as "computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose" That's the Wikipedia wording, but you'll find many similarly worded definitions in US and EU guidelines and regulations.

While I agree in part that talking only about this possibility of reading alone is limited, universal recognition is very wrong, a lie from an organisation that does not acknowledge the dissensus around a potential definition of open source.

Not everyone agree on the meaning of open source based on the Open Source Definition, that's a fact, a dissensus coming from the very nature of linguistics and definitions. It takes shape mostly around license restriction.

The OSD/OSI (liberal) interpretation is contested at least from 2 sides, the economical and ethical side.

From the economical perspective, it's mostly from VC/big corp backed "open source" company/projects using these days Business Source Licence and Server Side Public License to protect themselves against (cloud provider) competition, not recognized by the OSI where "source available" wording can be imposed but where open source may be still used with a conscious rejection of OSI/OSD.

See for example work done by @ssddanbrown Open Source Confusion Cases (+ article "Redefining Open Source via "Commercial Open Source")

There are two approaches to open source: orthodox and commercial. As a VC, we stick to the latter and consider e.g. Elastic and MongoDB as COSS companies, despite SSPL is not approved by the OSI.

From the ethical side, the liberal interpretation with the increasing visibility of issues generated by openness lead to a split of the community with the creation of the Organization for Ethical Source, where the OSD dominant community behaviour is not innocent in this demerger.

Ultimately, we are the heart and soul of FLOSS, not the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative or GitHub.
Coraline Ada Ehmke, Organization for Ethical source co-founder

Saying that everyone agrees on the meaning of open source would be pure propaganda. It's in part because you can use open source as you want for the better or the worst, even with capital letter, « Open Source » is nobody property.

Beware of the word police which imposes its vision.

Open Source Beyond software

I jump on the ambiguity as the textbook is titled « Open Source » and not « Open Source Software », but there are important questions regarding open source beyond software. A concept that can make sense for any kind of digital resources where there are challenges around the availability of their "sources".

Let's take for example your own textbook, which is open education/OER. It could have been only the website, freely available for reading ("open access"). But you also provide the sources of the textbook on github (in a source folder !) to enable its modification, evolution, reappropriation and so on.

For open education, the notion of « open source educational resource » was suggested to highlight this source availability, which are often missing: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14330

Open source derivate originally from "source code", but it seems to make sense regarding the source of digital resource more broadly.

Rather than open source software, it could be about open source resources, with « open source » being the practice of releasing publicly digital resources with their sources, whether it's software, educational content, research article, hardware design and so on, in open education, open science, open hardware... It's common to have open source professionals who acknowledge that open source is not limited to software.

This book on open source would then not explain itself, the open source practice used for its creation. Potential implications could vary between renaming the book to changing its topic, open source is probably not open source !

I'm reacting as I'm facing open source confusion and working on the meaning of open source, if it can provide food for thought on the topic. I'm slowly working on a knowledge base on open source (open-source-undefined.org) to gather information around this notion, an approach between research and education.

To better understand this dissensus and confusion about open source, there is a list of points of view on it: https://open-source-undefined.org/resources/open-source-reflections.html

I invite you to take a critical look at what the OSI or I have to say, to consider open source confusion to have a better understanding of the concept.

What if we still don't know what « open source » is ?