Collaboration is a core value in open source: the Internet Word War (II or III ? 🥱) is taking place on the meaning of open source.

A vision is being challenged by an ethical and economical wings of the (non-)open source community, and by the fact that the notion of open source may not be specific to software.

This conflict is crystallized around the Open Source Initiative [OSI] and the Open Source Definition [OSD], created in 1998.

What is open source (software) ? It depends.

The orthodox answer is that you are open source when you have software with its code freely available under a licence validated by the OSI.

Validated by the OSI mean (politically) compliant to the Open Source Definition. The OSD prohibits discrimination against « persons or groups » and « fields of endeavor », that's where conflicts take shape.

With the worrying evolution of the world but also as we realise the impact of open source in « surveillance capitalism, data harvesting, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression [...] », some concerns arise on how to prevent bad usages. License are seen as a tool to limit them.

Open source is increasingly becoming a known economical approach for businesses. Some projects can be threatened by big tech, who can take the software and sell services with it. To protect themselves from these threats, dozens of organisations use license as a defence against these players.

Without claiming to judge whether their strategy is effective, they both include incompatible clauses with the OSD.

OSI, which claims to define open source, reject them to be qualified as open source. Defenders of OSD/OSI will say that they're not against that, just that they should call themselves something else. Source available, ethical source, shared source, post-open source, open code... whatever they want outside of "open source".

People involved for decades in open source communities find themselves not knowing how to define themselves, rejected by a significant part of the "open source community". If it's not open source, what is it?

Some of them are ending up on the conclusion that they are doing open source in a different flavor. We have multiple entity and players claiming that they represent open source.

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

In addition to this internal conflict among IT specialists, open source seems to make sense in other areas such as open education and open hardware around sources of digital resources. Not considered by OSD/OSI and where restrictions on players or practices are much more common.

For basic linguistic reasons, the outcome of this war is certainly already determined. Performative definitions against popular phenomena are doomed to fail.

In the coming years, open source may be defined against the Open Source Initiative.