« Open source » is a confusing notion as it remains undefined. Its meaning has never really been considered, the word being adopted in 1998 in the face of the confusion factor coming from "free software".
Today, no definition that fully captures the phenomenon has been thought of. When the term was adopted, nobody tried to understand what it meant to open a source for digital technologies.
Some may argue that there is the Open Source Definition.
The word « open source » was formalized during a meeting, then the Debian Free Software Guidelines were debranded, generalized and renamed to the Open Source Definition.
There has been no real process to analyse the meaning of the term through descriptive linguistics, to try to get the entire essence of the word.
Born following the theorization of collaborative practices in the Cathedral and the Bazaar, this Open Source "Definition" do not even mention collaboration.
They were already aware of the use of « open source » outside of software, in the intelligence community notably, but this "Open Source Definition" not mention anything outside software source code.
It's definitely Orwellian, but the Open Source Definition was not an attempt to define open source, it's more a misleading set of licence criteria.
The concept having matured 25 years along with the democratization of digital technology, its meaning becomes more complex over the years.
Basically, in relation to other openness movements, is « Open Source » more about source code of software or source of digital resources ?
Because of the Open Source Definition, some believe it's a defined concept. In reality, the definition process never truly began.
Without any real definition, the concept remains unclear and the confusion ends up being everywhere. I try to navigate in this confusion accompanied by constant doubt.
« Open Source Undefined: Overview of the Digital Bazaar » is a project to report this state of open source and to try to capture the different dimensions of the concept: open-source-undefined.org
« Open source » is a concept that needs to be defined, notably to reduce open source confusion factors.
No one know what open source really is.
Image: Uday Mittal, Unsplash
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