> Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.

We don't have to have this debate again. Folks have tried this rhetorical tack so often there is an entire wikipedia page[1] dedicated to explaining the difference between source available and open source...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

This is an opinion article and you should realize that opinions do not make definitions.

"Conversely, Richard Stallman argues the "obvious meaning" of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted"

See, here's another Wikipedia article with another opinion that disagrees, and RMS is obviously an authority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#%22Open%22_versus_...

All of this is pointless so the common and accepted definition should be preferred. Which does not add extra political criteria for requirements.

In my experience the common and accepted definition generally matches with the one the OSI uses, people generally use “shared source” or something to refer to things that don’t fit that

Well, you'd be wrong: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source

In case you don't know, the dictionary doesn't prescribe meaning, it catalogs the commonly accepted usage of a word. That's why it listed "literally" to mean "figuratively", because along the way, people started using "literally" to mean "figuratively", so that's the definition now.

The common definition of open source does not match the OSI definition...

> people generally use “shared source” or something

"Shared source" was a Microsoft license and not at all generally accepted by anyone. A quick Google search found no references to this term used to describe open source.

That’s a highly simplified, non-technical definition for people who aren’t necessarily computer literate. Compressing it to a single sentence will leave out important details about the word’s usage

On the topic of descriptivism/prescriptivism, Richard Stallman is very pedantic and prescriptive about how people use language (e.g. the GNU/Linux thing) so I don’t really respect him as an authority on this topic at all

Also if there are restrictions you can argue it doesn’t even meet that definition because it’s not “freely available”

I may have mixed up “shared source” and “source available” (which seems more common)

I’ve put a poll on a Discord server I’m on (about calculators, so I don’t think there will be bias) and I’ll report back with what people think

Edit: I had three people vote and they agreed with me but also someone mentioned that I should probably let it go now which fair, it’s too easy to get invested in Internet arguments that don’t matter

What is that difference?

The definitions from the FSF and OSI are very similar, and the lists of approved licenses are mostly the same.

FYI it doesn't matter. What matters is the text of the license.

> Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.

Where was that defined so? And most of all, given the domain of information technology, who understand open source to cover cases where the source is available ie. only for reviewing?

The purpose of words and terms is so that people can exchange ideas effectively and precisely, without needing to explain the terms every time from the grounds up. Having different groups having divergent definitions on the same words is counterproductive towards that goal. In my view, labeling a release "open source" with very big limitations on how the source is used is just not about marketing, it's miscommunication.

If "open source" and "source available" (and "open weights") mean the same thing, the how come people have come up with the two terms to begin with? The difference is recognized in official contexts as well, i.e. https://web.archive.org/web/20180724032116/https://dodcio.de... (search for "source available"; unfortunately linking directly doesn't seem to work with archive.org pages).

It doesn't seem there is any benefit in using less precise terms when better-defined ones are available.

Now you get to graduate into the pedantry of defining the word “source”.

There's no reason for pedantry. Source is pretty well defined.

Which is how we know that AI models don't have any - and therefore can't be open source.

Still blows my mind that "binaries available" is called open source in the machine learning sphere. It's like calling Office 2007 open source (as opposed to the current browser versions) because you could run the binaries on a local machine