Quite a remarkable lack of IANAL flags for a lot of people talking about false advertising/trademark law...IANAL but the minimal data I have suggests the phrase “open source” has very little protection (not strictly claimed on OSI website, no major track record of being defended in court, broadly accepted vague definition, unlikely to damage the trademarked brand’s image/rep).
Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is...
I think people have just figured out that "IANAL" goes without saying in any online public discussion, unless for whatever reason it happens to be in a forum where arbitrary participants are especially likely to be lawyers. This is not a commercial context where fraud would be a concern, and even if the speaker was a lawyer there is no reasonable expectation of any attorney-client relationship between random participants in a public discussion. "IANAL" flags are superfluous.
> Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is...
The de facto accepted way to say that a license is OSI compliant is to refer to it as "open source".
nybble41|5 years ago
I think people have just figured out that "IANAL" goes without saying in any online public discussion, unless for whatever reason it happens to be in a forum where arbitrary participants are especially likely to be lawyers. This is not a commercial context where fraud would be a concern, and even if the speaker was a lawyer there is no reasonable expectation of any attorney-client relationship between random participants in a public discussion. "IANAL" flags are superfluous.
> Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is...
The de facto accepted way to say that a license is OSI compliant is to refer to it as "open source".