I made my point incredibly poorly as I was a bit pressed for time. My bringing up other initiatives misled you as to the point I was poorly trying to make. My point was that laypersons know what the words mean - there is no "aha, it actually means <an entirely unrelated definition of the words used>!" in the words "childhood cancer data". If one knows the words "childhood", "cancer", and "data" they can accurately guess what "childhood cancer data" means and that is not the case for "open source" which has an obvious meaning in plain English which is also not what it means at all.

How people use words matters almost as much as what those words mean - and meaning can change because of how people use words over the course of years, decades, or centuries. Pointing at a dictionary is only useful when clarifying which meaning is being used.

> That's not what's at issue.

Then what is the issue, if you don't mind me asking? The issue as I understand it was what was meant by "open source" and my not already prescribing to the OSI's definition of it. Pointing to the OSI's definition cleared the air about which definition was being used but did not resolve the issue that the phrasing is easily misunderstood outside of the OSS community and is the reason the term "FLOSS" exists to circumvent the issue. The fact they had to specify the definition as defined by OSI and not "source available" is part of the issue. That this misperception exists at all is part of the issue. That the OSI has had to plea with people to please use the branding how they want it to be used [0] is part of the issue. That it is not totally uncommon to see "open source" to only mean "source available" is part of the issue. That "open source" has an obvious plain-English meaning separate from it's "intended meaning" is part of the issue. This is an issue that has existed in the community for the entirety of its 23 years of existence, been spoken about at length by both the OSI and FSF as being an issue, and some people are acting like it's the first time they've ever heard about this being an issue or even denying that it is an existing issue at all.

I'm not sure how many articles from community leaders and the very people who defined the words in the first place speaking about the issue being an issue I need to cite before people go "OK maybe it is an existing issue and not just Nadya saying it's an existing issue when it isn't."

To actually and intentionally move the goalposts this time: It still isn't even logically sound that because you're able to fork and send a PR on Github that the project is "open source" to begin with and it especially doesn't follow that the project is compliant with OSI's definition of "open source". Per my understanding of the Github Terms of Service Section D Parts 4-7 the license given to other users only extends so far as to their using Github's functionality (including "forking") - which I'm reading as not providing any license to compile or redistribute modified source code compiled into an executable. Making sending a PR possibly the only reasonable method of ensuring that a fix or feature makes it to end users.

[0] https://opensource.org/node/163