Still not open source many hours later after multiple people said to put a license on it. Calling something open source when its not is really not okay, and it is hurting free and open source software.
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But source available would be the term to use if one wants to point out that the source is on github.
Github has an overview of some of your options: https://github.com/readme/guides/open-source-licensing
(It's kinda weird, because to make a PR, I had to make a fork, and then I added the licence to my fork, even though I'm not allowed to pick the licence, but )
free software is software you don't have to pay money to use, it doesn't matter if you have access to the code or not.
source available means the source is available on request and with restrictions to keep it private. doesn't matter if the software is free or not.
He expressed anxiety and unfamiliarity with adding a license he didn't understand. Not to mention multiple users started arguing over the best license, further highlighting why he shouldn't just trust random internet comments and actually look into it. You're going to harass him for it? Do you own his time for the next week because he made a post on HN? Because that attitude is way more harmful to OSS than what you're up in arms about.
Furthermore, this is colloquially open-source to most people, and you're hung up on semantics. Anybody that needs to care about a license can look and see if one is there. If it's so simple to understand a license and add it to your project in such a short span of time, surely it's simple to check for the existence of one in the first place.
> [common; also adj. open-source] Term coined in March 1998 following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the negative connotations (to suits) of the term “free software”.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/O/open-source.html
I looks like open source means more that just ability to read the code.
Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive.
If someone uses a term like "open source" in a way that is clearly different from how you understand the word, that doesn't make them wrong. All it does it highlight a different perspective.
You can attempt to tell them that they are wrong to use the term that way. It's changing the topic and distracts from the point, so if that's your goal, go for it. Most people don't react well to it. You can think that they should be okay with it, but people don't tend to react well to that either.
it's your choice.
Ditto (first tech job was in '87).
So I guess you are saying that you're aware that "open source" means a specific thing to many people in this field, but are going to use it in a confusing (to many) way rather than using the unloaded "source available"? You do you, but don't expect everyone to agree to switch from this fairly common usage. Makes it look like you're just searching for an argument.
This is a daily thing in my experience, often internalized to the point I don't notice until reflecting later. It doesn't feel like friction to me. This is the unavoidable nature of trying to connect with someone using language.
Free software is software that grants the four essential freedoms [0]. It doesn't matter if it's gratis or not.
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms