this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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No, my wording was intentional. I was describing the journalist’s direction of inference, not asserting the definition in reverse. They saw the term “open source” and mentally reduced it to “the source code is viewable”, which is why I phrased it that way.
It means that PLUS many more conditions. If you remove those additional conditions it's not open source anymore but "source available".
To be precise: open source implies source-available, but source-available does not imply open source.
Heh your "precise" statement is literally what I said:
Cheers.
What you're talking about is "source-available." I.e. being able to read source code but not having licensing rights to redistribute or make changes.
"Open-source" means that being able to modify and distribute changes is built into the license of the code.
For example, Minecraft Java is source-available in that decompiling Java bytecode is trivial - enough so that tools exist which can easily generate a source code dump. However, actually distributing that source code dump is technically illegal and falls under piracy, so it isn't open source.
Edit: I didn't see your edit, this comment is kind of pointless, oh well
Yeah, people keep correcting me by reiterating exactly what I'm saying lol