There is one small terminological mistake which I'll write to the author about: the use of "open source" to mean "non-copyleft (permissively licensed)" as contrasted with "free software" to mean "copyleft (reciprocally licensed)".
I see this all the time, but it's historically unfounded. The Free Software Foundation accepts both copyleft licenses like GPL and noncopyleft licenses like BSD as "free software" and the Open Source Initiative accepts both as "open source". This has always been true, because the Open Source Definition was derived directly from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and "open source is a marketing campaign for free software".
The terms were always intended to have the same denotation and a different connotation (although there are somewhere around 2 non-widely-used licenses whose acceptability FSF and OSI came to different conclusions on).
The distinction that the author was quite accurately getting at, but ended up missing, is that people who prefer to say "free software" are much more likely to think that copyleft is often preferable to permissive licensing, while people who prefer to say "open source" are less likely to think that. When RMS says "that companies that tout open-source principles often 'seduce our community to release free software without copyleft'" the causal relationships at work are much subtler (since many of those companies release primarily copylefted software, even when they are the copyright holders!).
I think I need to write the canonical Open Source and Free Software Refer to the Same Software page...
I don't disagree with you, but the term "open source" predates the OSI by quite some time and was in common usage to mean "source code you could read" rather than binaries.
OSI may (and have) redefine it, but it is historically founded that it meant readable code delivered with the binaries rather than binaries only.
I've sometimes heard that, but I don't have a personal recollection of hearing the term used that way before. Do you happen to know of particular examples of people using "open source" that way before 1998?
My earliest memory of it was circa 1990 when we had problems getting source code out of escrow for a system, and we were advised to make sure the next system was open source.
Edit: Check this 1993 document by NASA: "National security and national competitiveness: Open source solutions; NASA requirements and capabilities"
OK, maybe, it was the first one I came across. Well, you can claim they invented the term in 1998 and I guess I can't convince you otherwise unless I dig up some old documents, which is unlikely.
Anyway, FWIW, we used the terms "open source" and "open source code" way before that and it was widely understood. I don't have any reason to make that up.
> Anyway, FWIW, we used the terms "open source" and "open source code" way before that and it was widely understood. I don't have any reason to make that up.
Perhaps it was your personal jargon. I don't see any evidence that it was widespread before 1998.
I think it's more likely that your memory is failing, and OSI's campaign was so successful that they really convinced you that you always called it "open source". It has been close to two decades, after all. We can forget.
That's what you would interpret if you heard someone say "open source" but that would have been two words put together, not a term. The OSI people invented the term.
You are mistaken. The term was not used with reference to available software source code before February 3, 1998; it had a mostly unrelated meaning in espionage.
I see this all the time, but it's historically unfounded. The Free Software Foundation accepts both copyleft licenses like GPL and noncopyleft licenses like BSD as "free software" and the Open Source Initiative accepts both as "open source". This has always been true, because the Open Source Definition was derived directly from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and "open source is a marketing campaign for free software".
The terms were always intended to have the same denotation and a different connotation (although there are somewhere around 2 non-widely-used licenses whose acceptability FSF and OSI came to different conclusions on).
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
The distinction that the author was quite accurately getting at, but ended up missing, is that people who prefer to say "free software" are much more likely to think that copyleft is often preferable to permissive licensing, while people who prefer to say "open source" are less likely to think that. When RMS says "that companies that tout open-source principles often 'seduce our community to release free software without copyleft'" the causal relationships at work are much subtler (since many of those companies release primarily copylefted software, even when they are the copyright holders!).
I think I need to write the canonical Open Source and Free Software Refer to the Same Software page...