This article now forms part of an OSI position.

This article has moved to the OSI Blog.

During the discussions around European digital agenda legislation, I have frequently heard people proposing to define “open source” within a draft instrument. But that's a surprisingly difficult thing to do – it turns out that despite being a globally-understood term-of-art, capturing the whole thing in a phrase simple enough to use in a recital requires a great deal of thought and experience.

So people mostly defer to the OSI Open Source Definition, which is not designed for that purpose. This post considers three different ways to consider open source — knowing it when you see it, knowing it by its goals and knowing it by summarising its mechanism — and includes a recital-ready definition of open source for use in legislation that embodies the global consensus of its meaning.

Update: This has now graduated to the OSI Blog.

No, open source advocates are not engaged in “special pleading” to try to get open source given an unreasonable artificial market advantage in Europe, as some are alleging. From the very beginning I have heard people claiming that open source advocates are trying to get open source software per se excluded from the scope of regulation by the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Even now it seems people are still hearing this.

Update: This post has graduated to the OSI blog and is also available en Français.

Update: This post has graduated to the OSI Blog.

Update: This has now graduated to the OSI Blog.

Update: This has now graduated to the OSI Blog.

Update: Graduated to the OSI Blog