The Death of the Term "Open Source Software"

I don't understand.  Matt Asay has a good post on all the good competition in a growing market for various solutions based on open source software.  In it, however, he includes CentricCRM, the company that claims to be an open source company but isn't.  I went back to the CentricCRM site.  Here's their license link.  (It hasn't changed since I last posted on it.) 

We're not talking about business model problems here.  I have no problem with them selling a software product that is closed or proprietary.  Customers will pay for value.  And I have no problem with them showing up at every conference/convention around the open source world as they run on Linux systems. 

But I do have a problem with them claiming to be open source when the license clearly is as far from the definition as can be.  Their marketing team is either:

• Willfully misrepresenting its offerings i.e. lying to customers, or
• Ignorant in ways that could be cured by a couple of minutes on the web. [Google "open source software".  Link #1 is something called "The Open Source Initiative."  A prominent link on their home page is called "The Open Source Definition".]

Speaking of which, why isn't the OSI weighing in here?  If this were Microsoft, we would see the press and blog world gnashing its collective teeth, there'd be "open letters" from the OSI decrying the abuse of language, and no end of snarling about Microsoft's mis-use of a well defined term.  Even Microsoft made up their own terminology around Shared Source (neither willfully misrepresenting its offerings and certainly not in ignorance.) 

What am I not understanding?  Did I miss a blog discussion somewhere?  Is everyone okay with this?  I will happily change my opinion if given better data.  By all means educate me in the comments -- please!

Comments

[Dalibor Topic]

Their code is for internal use only, according to the link you posted, so it's by no means open source software.

The term 'open source company' otoh, is rather meaningless, as it's being applied to all sorts of questionable companies either by themselves, or by friendly souls. When I see that term, I think of it as a negative indicator of something shady being involved in the way a company does open source software development if they insist on branding themselves as such.

[Jeff Gordon]

The problem you're having is an offshoot of the one I'm having... which is the clarification of the definition of "open source". It's great that OSI has defined it... but the truth is that per the term "open source", many folks believe that if they provide the source code with the object code, that they're riding the open source wave.

Don't change your definition... just realize that there are a lot of folks who simply don't understand that open source is really a way of life - a movement (as the FSF likes to say). So that means that there will always be companies that believe that they're offering open source software, even when they're not.

There's not a simple solution to this problem, though. In fact, quite frankly, there won't ever be any solution. Sorry.

And the more I think about it, the issue is really just going to get bigger over time. With 50+ "open source" relatively-popular licenses (and more coming out every day), open source licensing is simply custom software licensing... with any number or permutations of the OSI-defined set of rights.

[Carlos Sanchez]

There was a talk about open source at the RedmonkOne (CommunityOne day of JavaOne) with one of the OSI people, and basically it was clear that they don't have the bandwidth to sue all the violators and it's enforced by public shame.

[Fernando]

This is something Richard Stallman has been rambling about for quite some time, but as usual people don't listen to him until what he predicted happens. "Open-source" is very different from "free software" (as in freedom). Stallman has been warning people that the spread of the term open-source would be very damaging to the free software ecosystem, as "open-source" can mean just about anything, as this "Centric Public License" shows. It sounds more friendly to businesses, because open-source has no moral connotations, it doesn't imply freedom, only that you can look at the source code - which by itself is not much, if you're then not allowed to do much with it... And you're right, I think people should do something about it, but short of educating my peers, I have no idea what to do.