TIME and again, people try to redefine the term ‘open source’, which has a well-known definition, to suit their own needs. We’ve seen people come up with all sorts of arguments why their stuff is really ‘open source’, why ‘open source’ does not mean what we think it does, and why it’s not even important. But it’s always notable that they’re doing this while trying to co-opt the term.

The latest salvo in this inane war is by the infamous David Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH to save us some typing):

Love how calling Fizzy open source is triggering some because our MIT-derived O’Saasy License reserves SaaS monetization rights to us as creators. Same nerds will demoan lack of "sustainable OSS" or argue that handing over all changes under GPL is akshually freedom. Hilarious.

I’m reminded of the immortal Luke Skywalker quote:

Amazing. Every word of what you just said, is wrong.

Let’s break it down:

triggering

Triggering? Annoying, maybe. Like, here we go again. ‘Triggering’ is the word you use, I guess, when you want to instantly dismiss the other side. Oh well.

Same nerds will demoan

I’ll have you know I’ve never demoaned anything in my life. Bemoaned, maybe. But never demoaned!

lack of "sustainable OSS"

As far as I’ve seen, no one has claimed this. In fact, we’ve actually been saying it’s not OSS, so whatever sustainability strategy you’re going for here (SaaS monetization), isn’t even relevant. The part we’ve been protesting is that you’ve been calling it ‘open source’. We’ll circle back to that.

handing over all changes under GPL is akshually freedom

Well, GPL is meant to guarantee the important freedoms of software to users. OSS is meant to achieve the same goal. The goal being: avoiding vendor lock-in.

Vendor lock-in

People forget this, but vendor lock-in is what gave rise to the Free Software movement, and thus to open source. Richard Stallman couldn’t get his printer to work and couldn’t just fix it himself because the software was proprietary and they refused to give him the source code.

The whole idea behind Free Software, and by extension OSS, is that you’re not locked in to your vendor. If tomorrow they go away, or jack up your price, you’re not just stuck. You have the option to go to a different vendor and get them to maintain the software for you. This creates, in a sense, a perfect free market condition. Economists fantasize about markets like this. With OSS we’ve actually created it.

But people today still haven’t learned their lesson! They commit to the Oracles, the Salesforces, the Jiras, and tons of other vendors hoping and praying that they don’t get screwed over. And when they inevitably do get screwed over, they finally start looking for alternatives–at massive cost.

OSS as anti-monopoly

OSS is the antidote to this situation. If tomorrow your PostgreSQL host jacks up their prices, you just move to a different host. Same with Linux, Redis, PHP, WordPress, etc.

And users (think: companies, aka paying customers) love this. This is one of their de-risking strategies: avoid vendor lock-in. This has made OSS a massive success, for decades. And (a large) part of this success is due to the definition of open source ensuring that all OSS licenses allow avoiding vendor lock-in. You can just pick up your software and take it to a different vendor.

And people look at this massive success and brand recognition and think: if I just put my code on GitHub and call it ‘open source’, it looks great and gives me a huge boost. And when you point out it’s not open source, they argue, who are you to gatekeep the definition of open source?

Well I would argue, why do you care so much about calling your thing ‘open source’? Why not ‘source available’? Why not ‘public source’? Or whatever? It’s because you know the brand recognition and cachet of the term ‘open source’. This didn’t just happen out of thin air, spontaneously. It took the work of many, over decades, to build a massive success story of a competitive, free market, commons.

And you want to come in and cash in on this success while refusing to allow the one thing that made the success possible: to let anyone be a vendor for the software. You want to be the sole vendor? Keep it proprietary. Use a source-available license. Nobody will bat an eye. Nobody cares! Go and make your money.

Just don’t care it ‘open source’.