> There's no room for arguing, and there's no in-between — any software whose license doesn't belong to the OSI's list is proprietary software.
There's plenty of room for arguing. The FSF, in fact, approves a few licenses that OSI doesn't.
> any software whose license doesn't belong to the OSI's list is proprietary software.
This is an absurd interpretation from someone who does not understand why people actually even care about Open Source.
Any license that meets the currently accepted definition of "Open Source" should be considered "Open Source" (tautological, I know). Whether it's in a list by some organization or not is mostly irrelevant. Having the OSI list is useful only because it helps people check whether a certain license adheres to the definition or not... but if the license is not in the list, you could still check yourself whether it meets the definition, and if it does, it's Open Source.
Now, one could argue about who "owns" the definition of Open Source... well, then yes, I would agree that OSI's is the most widely accepted definition and everyone does well to try to follow that. That does NOT imply only OSI has the right to claim a license is open source!
Well, starting from your point, I can write my software as a complete blob and add its 10 line launcher as a small source file, license that 10 line launcher as MIT, while adding a very restrictive EULA to the blob.
Then put it out as open source.
Makes sense.
Can you explain the connection between your comment and what my comment said? I fail to see any.
The problem with your perspective from my point of view, is how convoluted the licenses can be.
Licenses are legal text by nature, and some of them are pretty convoluted. I can write an open-source license with a sneaky retroactive licensing loophole, and create problems for anyone forking/using my code with that theoretical license. Similar landmines can be implemented in bad faith or loopholes can be found in good-faith licenses (TiVoization, anyone?).
So, just because a license satisfies four freedoms doesn't make a piece of software "Open Source". So a body examining licenses and saying that it's acceptable or not is a good thing to have.
We have been reinventing things and damaging tons of stuff just because we feel like having established things is bad to start with.
> So, just because a license satisfies four freedoms doesn't make a piece of software "Open Source".
It wasn't clear what your intent was when you presented your example, since it does not actually illustrate your point. A piece of software consisting of a proprietary blob coupled with a minimal open source launcher is closed source as a whole because the majority of the software is closed source. That software does not satisfy the four freedoms, and is therefore not open source.
> So a body examining licenses and saying that it's acceptable or not is a good thing to have.
Yes, the OSI and FSF are important for establishing clear standards, and for helping developers and users identify exactly which licenses meet those standards.
It was exaggerated example on purpose, but it's not very far from the truth. Many "Open Source" projects are licensed under a permissive or weak-copyleft license, everything incl. the source is put out there, hence you have the four freedoms, theoretically.
A nice example: Try to "run" GitBook in a self hosted manner. You're free to do that. The code is out there. The license allows it, but there's no docs, and code is a landmine, probably.
As I said before, try to use VSCodium in a useful manner. You won't be able to do that. You can incorporate parts of it to your tools, but it won't work as well as the "closed source, official" VSCode, because it's designed to be like that [0].
So, saying that every license allowing four freedoms is an open source license, or even saying that "every application which has a valid, vetted Open Source license" is Open Source software is a stretch nowadays.
Lastly, we seen that not many companies thought about the ramifications of open sourcing their code properly. Elastic & HashiCorp are just two examples we made some noise about.
VSCodium does exclude the proprietary features of Visual Studio Code, but I don't see how that should disqualify VSCodium from being open source. (I use VSCodium frequently and I am satisfied with its feature set, so I strongly disagree with your claim that it is not usable in a useful manner.) VSCodium is also maintained by a community that is not sponsored by Microsoft, so I don't think it's fair to say that it is intentionally designed to be inferior to Visual Studio Code. We both agree that Visual Studio Code is not open source.
Elasticsearch (Elastic License, Server Side Public License) and HashiCorp (Business Source License) have adopted licenses that do not provide the four freedoms, and the software licensed in that way is not open source.