>Well...characterizing the usage as a marketing term wouldn't be relevant if the potential for making money weren't an issue here.

There is nothing wrong with marketing a project, be it open source, proprietary, free, non-free, etc. I never suggested that. Just about everything is 'marketed' in some sense.

>Even beyond that, on a human level, the attacks on an individual trying to make a living seem unnecessarily harsh. My critique is mostly about the spirit of the negative comments (not just yours, sorry), which all seem to assume malice where there likely is none. I.e. several comments here and on the github repo calling the developer a liar and coward, etc (again, not you, this just happened to be the comment I replied to)

It's because there's a lot of passion involved. Even people who are pretty great open source developers have acted in a way that is perhaps not so noble if you read the flagged comments.

However, I don't think this is necessarily out of assumption of malice. The problem is, it doesn't matter if the author is malicious or not. The term 'open source' carries some connotations that many people have an intuitive understanding of today. I firmly believe the very reason a lot of big projects choose open source is for the marketing benefit, and imo it is not deserved if your project isn't really open source. This could seriously harm the reputation of something that took decades to build, and if that seems alarmist, well, I know I'm not alone in this sentiment.

>And I think this entire discussion proves that the definition of 'open source' is not as cut and dry as some people would like. And because of that, saying 'just be honest' when someone uses one of the alternative definitions of the term seems unfair.

>I've always thought that the terms FOSS exists specifically to provide some extra clarity in this regard...

> I don't know what you'd call this other than "open source" because I haven't heard the term "source available" until today, and I would have had no idea what it meant if that's what the developer had used....

The thing is, if I say something is 'open source,' you almost certainly, today, will understand that to mean what it has meant for decades: the OSI definition of open source, contrary to the wishes of some (including rms, for example.) This is just the layperson's understanding. They may not have a deep understanding of licenses or permissiveness, but it comes with a sense of what a project has to offer. Being able to profit off of open source is something that people inherently understand nowadays, and it took a long time for that to happen.

The reason you wouldn't have understood another term is because there is not a common understanding for 'source available' or 'commons clause.' This is because it was not very popular in recent years, and remains relatively unpopular. It is mostly pushed by companies that built amazing open source projects and had trouble with creating a sustainable business around it.

And therein lies the contention.

- Because of what Open Source implies, it gives projects a decent marketing boost - including, of course, the common case where they are truly open source. People rely on open source projects understanding the implications and knowing roughly what they can do with it.

- Commons clause doesn't imply the same things. But some companies are trying to use the term 'open source' to describe them anyways. To me, this looks a lot like trying to have cake and eat it too. It's not the same 'open source' that people have slowly grown to understand.

Of course most people won't understand why this issue has much contention, because this type of thing seems like a minor detail. In fact, many people, including me, initially found it confusing that licenses like GPL allow you to profit off the work so as long as you follow the other clauses. It took me a long time to understand that this is a very important part of what makes open source special: the disconnect from the profit model. If you reconnect the development and licensing to the profit model, in my mind this is losing a key part of what makes open source so damn effective. Having many stakeholders that all profit from a project can be incredible - the Linux kernel being one such example.

People have to make money, though, and so going through the risky proposition of making truly open source software and trying to build a business around it is not always appealing. In my opinion, the obvious choice is to not make open source software. So-called "commons clause" is one option. But again, I think there is real danger in "open source" being conflated with things that nobody understands it to be.