The term 'open source' means radically different things to different people, which is why debates about it so often talk past each other. The post enumerates 16 distinct definitions — from a formal licensing regime and development methodology, to a business model, supply chain, political movement, social identity, governance model, forkability guarantee, and even pure 'vibes'. Two definitions are singled out as especially harmful: treating open source as a free help desk (demanding maintainer labour without compensation) and as free infrastructure (using registries and CDNs without considering who pays). The core argument is that 'open source' is a stack of incompatible expectations, and most debates about its death or triumph are actually about only one of these definitions at a time.
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