> so the word doesn't lose all meaning in the future
The English language doesn’t have a central body that decides what words get to exist, and what they mean, like e.g. the French.
English dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. The definitions are defined by popular culture, rather than a central body.
What is needed is a large enough mass of people to recognise a word as having a particular definition, in order to change/add that definition. See “literally” having a definition of “for emphasis, not literally” as a prime example of the wisdom of crowds.
Right, I don't think my complaint is "Why isn't there a central body that defines words?" but rather "Why are we letting Meta propagate the idea that something we cannot re-create ourselves, can possibly be Open Source?" and I guess the implication is that I'm complaining about us letting Meta change the definition by popular culture, to use your words.
Words mean whatever's convenient to the bottom line, which is why the OSI (a consortium of Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc) still doesn't recognize the SSPL, as it would be particularly inconvenient for clouds.
So you're saying open source doesn't exist to be free labor for SaaS?
The OSI is fully captured by companies with a vested interest in promoting that model and/or using open source to 'dump' on the market and commoditize their compliments. To recapture the spirit of open source as being about freedom for actual users (as opposed to free labor for jailed SaaS) and a mutualistic gift culture (as opposed to a take-take-take culture) probably requires abandoning the OSI.
> To recapture the spirit of open source as being about freedom for actual users (as opposed to free labor for jailed SaaS)
That spirit was never there; "Open Source" was created to be corporate -friendly as it was predated by Free software, which is rigidly committed to users freedom.
> ”Open Source" was created to be corporate-friendly as it was predated by Free software, which is rigidly committed to users freedom.
Rigidly committed to a certain interpretation of users freedom. And that interpretation happens to involve removing a number of freedoms “for your own good”.
It is more correct to say that the GPL was created to be anti-corporate, as it was predated by both the MIT and BSD licenses, which are more free, both for users and corporations, which the FSF finds intolerable.
> That is a pretty cynical take. FSF good, OSI bad.
I ascribed no moral value judgement on which is better. However , Tim O'Reilly isn't exactly shy about who the target of those early Open Source conferences (OSCON) were, and what they were attempting to achieve - which they succeeded at.
Free software isn't great either. Stallman is fine with proprietary software as long as it's baked in ROM, which is even worse than making it distributable but without providing source.
ROM is generally firmware for an embedded processor, and being able to modify that opens up new possibilities for the device i.e. more freedom. For example it might be possible to implement new offload features on a network card - the fact that no one bothers to do so doesn't mean the possibility shouldn't be there. I'd rather have the vendor put it in public domain or thereabouts, and make it editable. They're making money by selling the hardware anyway.
It’s like the paradox of tolerance. If you are tolerant of the intolerant than intolerance wins.
If open source maximizes freedom for those that want to take freedom away from the end user, you get open source as it exists today: a free labor pool and shared toolbox for surveillanceware and closed SaaS plays.
Now if we only can get Meta to understand what "Open Source" means so the word doesn't lose all meaning in the future.