What a weird hill to choose to die on. I wasn't even aware of the trend, but I love it now that I'm aware of it; it makes total sense.
If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.
If you're a descriptivist, then why are is OSI getting a monopoly on everyone's vocabulary? You should be happy to let people use whatever term however they want. You know, freedom and all. You still don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.
> If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.
Honestly all of these exist in both hyphenated and unhyphenated usage in my experience and for long term and user friendly I’d guess unhyphenated gets more usage
The hyphenation probably stems from the fact that, grammatically, 'open-source' is a compound adjective. The LLMs are probably weighting this over the nature of 'open source' as jargon.
Commercial, paid: You must pay money, you get access to service or a binary, or something in between. No source code released.
Shareware: You get to download and use the binary for free. Parts of it are missing, you must pay to receive a copy of it. (DOOM, WinRAR, Duke Nukem)
Freeware: Binaries are free to use and distribute, complete functionality. Source code not published. (Adobe Acrobat Reader, Draw.io, IrfanView, Google Earth Pro)
Open-source: The source code is openly available. Sometimes development also happens in the open. (PHP, Apache HTTPD, Linux, GCC)
Open weights: AI model weights released including inference, tokenizer code and chat template. Some info released about how it was made. Training dataset and taining code NOT published. Crawler, scraper, book piracy, distillation methods: NOT published.
I think using `open source`, and clarifying that it includes non-OSI-approved licenses could work.
Alternatively, "source available" is a term that's been used to imply the source is there, but it's not "open source" (which led to the Fair Source folks working on their own naming for it, so as some folks have negative views of "source available")
There are two big organizations: FSF (Free Software Foundation) and OSI (Open Source Initiative), and while they have similar ideas, they disagree on the details. Free software is more in line with the ideas of the FSF (more idealistic), while open source is more in line with the idea of the OSI (more pragmatic).
There is also the term "libre" (meaning "free as in freedom") to distinguish it from software that doesn't cost money.
F/OSS is is GNU/Linux; the second part is the part which matters, but the first part keeps getting pushed by noisy people so we put up with it to keep them happy.
If you've not read up on the background between the two - I'd very much recommend it (and sorry if I'm re-explaining something you understand)
With Free Software, it's "free as in freedom", not "free as in gratis". Free Software is generally a bit more strongly biased towards the users of a piece of software, but as businesses started to use it they were a bit unhappy with that, so Open Source came to reduce that a little bit, making it easier for companies to use it, without as many strong protections for a user
There is no such thing as "correct" or "incorrect" hyphenation, or for that matter "correct English". Source: linguists
> Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. ... Rather, what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion.
Author:
> John McWhorter, contributing editor at The New Republic and columnist for The New York Daily News, teaches linguistics, American studies and Western civilization at Columbia University. His latest book is “What Language Is, What It Isn’t and What It Could Be.”
What a weird hill to choose to die on. I wasn't even aware of the trend, but I love it now that I'm aware of it; it makes total sense.
If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.
If you're a descriptivist, then why are is OSI getting a monopoly on everyone's vocabulary? You should be happy to let people use whatever term however they want. You know, freedom and all. You still don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.
MW also thinks it's hyphenated, but what do they know, right? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source
> If you're a prescriptivist, then open-source should be hyphenated for the same reason full-time, user-friendly, long-term, etc. are. That's how English works. You don't make the rules, and neither does OSI.
Honestly all of these exist in both hyphenated and unhyphenated usage in my experience and for long term and user friendly I’d guess unhyphenated gets more usage
The hyphenation probably stems from the fact that, grammatically, 'open-source' is a compound adjective. The LLMs are probably weighting this over the nature of 'open source' as jargon.
Commercial, paid: You must pay money, you get access to service or a binary, or something in between. No source code released.
Shareware: You get to download and use the binary for free. Parts of it are missing, you must pay to receive a copy of it. (DOOM, WinRAR, Duke Nukem)
Freeware: Binaries are free to use and distribute, complete functionality. Source code not published. (Adobe Acrobat Reader, Draw.io, IrfanView, Google Earth Pro)
Open-source: The source code is openly available. Sometimes development also happens in the open. (PHP, Apache HTTPD, Linux, GCC)
Open weights: AI model weights released including inference, tokenizer code and chat template. Some info released about how it was made. Training dataset and taining code NOT published. Crawler, scraper, book piracy, distillation methods: NOT published.
What instead? If not free software, then maybe ONF software: Open{- }source is Not Free.
I think using `open source`, and clarifying that it includes non-OSI-approved licenses could work.
Alternatively, "source available" is a term that's been used to imply the source is there, but it's not "open source" (which led to the Fair Source folks working on their own naming for it, so as some folks have negative views of "source available")
What has stuck with me is the phrase "free and open source," which is like, if the two were equivalent, there wouldn't be a need for the distinction.
Maybe that was when software binaries could be free but the source was not.
There are two big organizations: FSF (Free Software Foundation) and OSI (Open Source Initiative), and while they have similar ideas, they disagree on the details. Free software is more in line with the ideas of the FSF (more idealistic), while open source is more in line with the idea of the OSI (more pragmatic).
There is also the term "libre" (meaning "free as in freedom") to distinguish it from software that doesn't cost money.
F/OSS is is GNU/Linux; the second part is the part which matters, but the first part keeps getting pushed by noisy people so we put up with it to keep them happy.
Hah, yes very true!
If you've not read up on the background between the two - I'd very much recommend it (and sorry if I'm re-explaining something you understand)
With Free Software, it's "free as in freedom", not "free as in gratis". Free Software is generally a bit more strongly biased towards the users of a piece of software, but as businesses started to use it they were a bit unhappy with that, so Open Source came to reduce that a little bit, making it easier for companies to use it, without as many strong protections for a user
See also [1]
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html [1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
There is no such thing as "correct" or "incorrect" hyphenation, or for that matter "correct English". Source: linguists
> Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. ... Rather, what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion.
Author:
> John McWhorter, contributing editor at The New Republic and columnist for The New York Daily News, teaches linguistics, American studies and Western civilization at Columbia University. His latest book is “What Language Is, What It Isn’t and What It Could Be.”
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...