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cpks | 7 years ago

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 don't think the company claims it is either)

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PurpleRamen|7 years ago

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.

kfogel|7 years ago

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.