[0xfffafaCrash]

Have you considered that some people listen to text rather than read it? Do you think screen readers, non-native English speakers, or anyone else listening to these are able to reasonably differentiate between “Open Source” and “open source”?

Most readers won’t notice the difference or disregard it as meaningless and if you have to explain to everyone your position on a matter of communication it’s likely that you are the one who needs improvement with respect to your communication, not the rest of the world.

[wiether]

> non-native English speakers

As one of them, I can tell that I agree with @NiloCK.

Maybe because I'm French so I had to learn even stronger rules, but to me if someone doesn't capitalize proper nouns in English, I'll first think that I misunderstood what they were writing because of my deficiencies, before coming to the conclusion that they didn't capitalize.

Whereas, in French, I'm confident enough to mentally capitalize without even thinking about it.

[philipwhiuk]

> screen readers

Good screen readers will definitely pronounce capital letters differently by way of emphasis.

[NiloCK]

Apologies if I was unclear, but I'm not worried about being understood. It's rare for me to write on the topic.

My frustration is that I always have to guess at writers intention, and that the broader dialogue is confused by this lack of clarity.

This thread exemplifies it - people accused the BearBlog author of being a hypocrite because he says things like "It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it."

A more charitable read than the hypocrisy accusation is that the BearBlog author never believed in Open Source as intended by the OSI or MIT license, but rather believes in open source as colloquially used, for purposes of software legibility.

[popalchemist]

Impractical as he is, he is still technically correct, and I suspect, courts would back this stance were it ever to be tried in court.