It's not open source; the Hacker News headline is wrong. The Numworks web site does not claim it's open source, by the way -- the problem is only in the headline here. The license is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA), and the presence of the "NonCommercial" clause makes it unambiguously non-open-source. If that clause were not present, CC-BY-SA would still be an odd license to use for software anyway, but because of the NC clause we never get to that issue.
Source appear to be on GitHub. Non commercial is not incompatible with open source. It makes sense to me that to get the investment required to fund this, you’d want sole rights to commercialize. Nothing prevents someone else from building a cheaper DIY version as long as they don’t sell it. For example it could be a local college class exercise to build these from scratch for local high school. That’s not imaginable for the TI calculators (which these seem to aim to replace)
Source being on GitHub does not equal "is open source". Restrictions on commercial use are incompatible with open source. The Open Source Initiative, which coined the term and evaluates licenses for compatibility with the Open Source Definition (see https://opensource.org/definition), is crystal clear on this point: if your license has a field-of-use restriction -- such as a restriction on commercial use -- then it's not open source. This is why Numworks is careful not to describe their software as "open source", to their credit.
It may not be "Free Source", but if the source is open in the sense if being accessable, then for normal people it is open source. One organization using words in a specific way, doesn't negate all other legit interpretations of those words.
Nope. Open Source is a trademark precisely to avoid this sort of misuse. It's not a "what it means to whomever" sort of deal.
That was done in part due to intentional (and damaging, if ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to undermine the meaning of terms like 'Free Software' by Microsoft back when the FSF was a fledgling movement and Microsoft was an evil empire.
I don't mean to imply negative things about the company. The license is still a heck of a lot better than fully proprietary -- I love the product in part for that reason -- but it's definitely not 'open source' or 'free software' as the headline implies.
I'm talking about casual language-usage, like this headline, not commercial usage. Open and source are regular words, and they still are regular words when used together. Trademarks can't force people to talk as they want, it can only force company to not sell everything as they wish.
Yes, the term can't be trademarked, because they're both common English words used in combination (and that combination has a somewhat older, unrelated meaning, which further contributes to making the term untrademarkable).
But this isn't a trademark issue. No one has trademarked the word "carrots" either, but if someone were to sell pencils under the label "carrots", people would be understandably confused and annoyed.
It's the same thing here: don't call it open source if it's not. The software industry relies on that term having a specific, well-defined meaning. That meaning is widely agreed on, which, again, is why Numworks themselves is not claiming their stuff is open source.
Well, sure, language is ultimately defined by usage, so if enough of us agree that the word "broccoli" refers to source code being available, then it's legitimate to go around saying "broccoli" means "visible source", etc.
But the important question is, who is using "open source" to mean the definition I gave earlier? The answer is: pretty much everyone. Not just the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org) and the Free Software Foundation, but also: the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all government agencies who have formally defined the term (at least as far as I've seen), also every major tech firm as far as I can tell, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Samsung, Huawei, ... this list could go on for a very, very long time :-). Basically, it's everyone.
Notice that that list includes Creative Commons -- that is, the organization that wrote the particular license that Numworks is using agrees that that license is not open source. That's a pretty clear sign, I think :-).
And, of course, Numworks themselves are careful not to call their stuff "open source" anywhere. You can bet that they would use that term if they felt they could. It has great marketing karma; everyone loves to advertise their stuff as "open source". And yet Numworks doesn't -- because they know a lot of hackers would come down on them like a ton of bricks if they tried to make that claim.
To a first approximation, pretty much every organization that produces or procures software use the term "open source" to mean the definition that the Open Source Initiative originally established.
You can claim that "open source" means something else, if you want, in the same way that you can claim that the word "broccoli" or "red" means something different from what most other people mean by those words. For you, your meaning will be correct, in your own private language.
But what I'm saying is, when the phrase "open source" appears in a Hacker News headline, most people will interpret it in the way I described. When the vast majority of people intepreret a word or phrase as having a certain meaning -- and especially when it's a term of art in a profession and all the specialists, lawyers, policy makers, etc in that profession agree on the meaning of the term -- then it's fair to say that that is what the term "means".
Open source is a technical term (and I believe a trademark) with a specific meaning, defined by [The Open Source Initiative](https://opensource.org/). It does not merely mean that the source is available. As you hint at, being free software is a higher requirement, but this does not meet even the lower requirement of being open source.
I didn’t say it’s open source, and I don’t agree that the NC clause is incompatible with the notion of open source. I don’t recognize the OSI as the sole authority on the subject but a useful legal framework, so all your argumentation about definitions is moot for me.
> It makes sense to me that to get the investment required to fund this, you’d want sole rights to commercialize.
It indeed does make sense to commercialize. Nobody said otherwise. But making good sense does not make a software open source. Releasing a software under an open source license makes a software open source. CC-BY-NC-SA is not such a license.
Whether it's still open source is a bit of a semantic quibble. Fact is that a restriction to non-commercial usage is incompatible with all the major open-source licences like GPL, LGPL, Appache, BSD, MIT, etc. In a sense it's still open source, but the restriction is very unusual.
It's no more a "semantic quibble" than any other inaccurate use of a term is a semantic quibble. People are counting on headlines meaning what they say they mean, and this one doesn't.
If the headline mistakenly said "Lisp-compatible" instead of "Python-compatible", you wouldn't say "Oh, that's just a semantic quibble", right? You'd say it's wrong, flat out. The programming language it's compatible with is Python, not Lisp, so saying Lisp would just be inaccurate. (And they're both English words -- neither term is trademarked, obviously, and they both have meanings unrelated to their meanings in the realm of programming languages.)
Saying this is "open source" is wrong in exactly the same sense. The term has a settled meaning in the software world. The reason "non-commercial usage is incompatible with all the major open-source licenses", as you say, is that it is by definition incompatible with all open source licenses. Because "open source" means freedom for use for any purpose, including commercial purposes.
This is not merely a semantic quibble any more than any other wrong use of a word is a semantic quibble. It's wrong in the normal way that language usage can be wrong.
Instead of asserting the title is wrong, it would make sense to recognize that the title is correct, and that the discrepancy with your beliefs is simply a result of the fact that plenty of other people do not, in fact, take OSI's opinions as facts like you do.
The title is indeed wrong. There is no definition or usage of the word "open source" that is compatible with restriction of commercial usage.
Never in the history of free software or open source software from the release of Donald Knuth's TeX in 1979, to the birth of FSF in 1985, or the formalization of OSD in 1998 was it ever acceptable to forbid commercial usage in something that is known as open source.
The corruption of the word "open source" to mean anything with source code available on GitHub under a non-commercial license is very recent and does not reflect the true origin or meaning of the word "open source".
The implication that CC-BY-NC-SA could be open source seems to be your belief which is not based on facts.
This sounds a bit like the No True Scotsman fallacy. There is no official definition of "open source", so taking what the words literally mean, "open" and "source", ie the source code is open to view, is an acceptable definition.
To be fair, the "true origin" story is a little misleading. A bunch of douchebags wanted credit for Stallman's work and basically threw an underhanded hissy-cow to try to undermine him to co-opt his position. There was a pile of exaggerated (or often fabricated) stories thrown at the FSF. Commercial players came in to support the attack with a whole range of motives -- from wanting something more corporate to an "arm both sides" mentality to undercut the movement.
While I agree with your point, I'm not sure the alleged history supports it very well. It's a pretty ugly piece of the movement's history.
Now, that was two decades ago, those people are gone, and OSI is a very nice, good, and friendly organization today.
dataflow, I've made a few replies elsewhere in this thread that address what you said. I don't want to make noise by repeating them here, but wanted to point them out, in case you'd like to see the counterargument.
CC BY-NC-SA does not permit the use of the software for commercial purposes. This violates point 6 of the Open Source Definition[OSD] that says, "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."
For example, if the Russian School of Math, or Kumon, wanted to adopt this calculator and software (commercial use, tutoring center), they'd be breaking the license.
That's right. And prohibiting commercial exploitation violates one of the key clauses of both the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition (the part about freedom of use for any purpose). See https://opensource.org/faq#commercial. In other words "open source" doesn't just mean "you can see the source code" (that's known as "visible source" or "source available" software). Rather, "open source" means "meets the Open Source Definition", which is at https://opensource.org/definition.
The GPL allows all commercial use. It does not allow proprietary restrictions on redistribution, under certain circumstances, but that's different. You can charge as much money as you want for GPL'd software, and you can base your commercial service on GPL'd software, etc (by the way, this is not just hypothetical -- billions of dollars of commercial activity are based on GPL'd software, including but not limited to the Linux kernel). It's just that when someone receives a copy of GPL'd software from you, you can't place further restrictions on their redistribution -- the permission to redistribute under the GPL comes with the copies. Think of it this way: the GPL prevents monopoly, while permitting commercial use.
