A friend directed me to a comment thread over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog I occasionally read and considerably respect. The response I ended up writing is substantial enough that I think it’s worth posting here. I am the person who promulgated the term “open source”, and the senior founder of the OSI. As it happens, I’m also a semi-regular Volokh Conspiracy reader. Alas, there is a fair amount of misinformation in this thread. Beginning with the misuse of “open source” to mean code with source that is available for inspection but not freely redistributable and modifiable