POST: open source impoverishment

What are the benefits of open source software or free, libre and open source software?

If open source is defined by licensing, then the biggest win of open source has been to move legalese and legal discussion about software licensing to the background.

The essence of open source licensing has been to remove most of the friction about legales from software development.

I can talk about MIT, BSD or GPL and with each of these three letters, you know what licensing terms I am talking about. In contrast, a commercial contract or an unknown license will require legal review.

As a dev, I can make quick policy-aligned decision about whether or not I can reuse a piece of code with these few letters.

But a new generation of programmers wants to revisit this well established community status quo.
To them, developers do not care about "open source" as defined by the OSI or the FSF, and only a few old activist guys with backward ideas care for that.

And they are coming with new FUBAR fauxpensource licenses that erode and impoverish the discourse about software licenses, bringing legalese back to the forefront.

The sad thing is that these thrive on confusion and often present to be open source and use license that look like open source licenses, deceiving developers that cannot grasp all the minute details of legal shenanigans.

So this is a plea for open source licensing clarity, against things that look like but are not open source:

- Commercial licenses are fine.
- Open source and free and open source licenses are great.
- Proprietary and source available licenses based on confusing, open source-like terms that are trying to ride the coattails of FOSS goodwill with deception are a terrible poison pill.

Let's get rid of these.