[Balug-Talk] license count != software popularity (Re: Open Source less popular than Free Software)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jesse Zbikowski (embeddedlinuxguy at gmail.com):

> I think it's the other way around.  S.P. is calling their policy "open
> source" in a direct nod to Linux, etc.  Yes, people do refer to an
> uncompressed recording as "source" but I don't think that was their
> idea.

Hi there!

The fact that it's a _nod_ to (and, in a screwball way, loosely based
on) open source software is probably true but irrelevant to my point
that it's a different meaning being established in a _different
context_.  Yes, it's potentially mildly confusing to people, but that's
English for you.

Users of the English language spend a great deal of time determining
context before parsing word meaning:  What's a "bar"?  Is it a drinking
establishment?  A straight piece of some solid material?  An obstacle?
A submerged piece of sand or mud near a shoreline or in a river?  A
railing in a courtroom?  A collective theoretical grouping referring to
the lawyers accredited to a particular jurisdiction?  A vertical line
used in music notation?  A vertical stripe on a miltary uniform?

It's all of those things; we figure out from context, when someone
suggests going to a bar, whether to look around for a pub sign or a
stack of sheet music.

Yes, you're correct that people in mainstream culture often (if not
usually) have a very mistaken notion of what open source is in the
software context, and others (such as The Smashing Pumpkins) frequently
invent entirely new meanings in other contexts under the mistaken 
impression that they're borrowing that meaning.

People make a large number of dumb errors, particularly when they're
outside their fields of competence.  That is one of the things that 
creates confusion and _inadvertantly_ variant meanings in neighbouring
contexts.  It's nothing new.

> For example, the author Thomas Friedman refers to almost any kind of
> online project that's "bottom up" / "distributed" / "collaborative" as
> being "open source", e.g. bloggers are "open source" journalists.

But that is almost certainly _not_ a borrowing from the software
context, but rather from spook-industry jargon.  National Public Radio 
had a long-running late-night programme called "Open Sources":  Same
proximate semantic origin.

> This is an exception; as far as I know, OSINT is the only widespread
> use of the phrase "open source" which predates and does not refer to
> F/L/OSS.

Possibly.  But regardless of whether things like bands calling their
downloadable songs "open source" derived from someone's distorted notion
of the software-context meaning or not, those _are_ different contexts,
and it's a normal part of the muddle that is the English language for
meaning to be context-dependent.  Thus my point.