I expected that we should probably see references to these things all over the place when we look up the term “open source”. I assume they mean developing in the open and accepting contributions to be necessary ingredients to qualify a project as being in the spirit of open source. But what is the “spirit of open source” that they speak of? What is the essential ingredient? Looking For The Spirit Going back to the first camp, a common refrain I heard was that software that meets the Open Sourceĭefinition might “meet the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law” when it comes to open source. While others felt that the license is the sole determining factor for open source and I wasn’t helping anybody by trying to expand theĭefinition of “open source.” To my defense, I wasn’t trying to expand it so much as describe how I think a lot of people use the term today, but they have a good point. Many of them accepted that, yes, ASP.NET MVC is OSS, but I still shouldn’t use the term. There were those who felt that it was was disingenuous for me to use the term “open source software” to describe a Microsoft project that doesn’t accept contributions and is developed under a closed model, even if it is licensed under an open source license. It was interesting to me that critics fell into two opposing camps. If you disagree with me, I do humbly ask that you read the whole post first before you go and rip me a new one.

Some folks took issue with the post and that’s great! I love a healthy debate. I attempted to make a distinction between Open Source and Open Source Software.

Tired open source coders