Where in the article does the OSI mention or hint at anything about threat of law? The OSI does have the legal right to tell you what they think Open Source is. You have the legal right to ignore it. All OSI did is say "here is our definition of Open Source, and these are the people that agree with us, and you should agree with us too."
I wasn't referring to legality, only replying to the idea that "open" and "source" are "just two words". For an example closer to the subject at hand, the Free Software Foundation makes it clear what does and what does not fit the Free Software definition and that does not rely on the force of law.
Bourbon is just a just a name. Champagne is just a region. But whiskeys and wines have to fit narrow qualifications to be Champagne sparkling wine, or Bourbon whiskey. You can, of course, call any software you want open source regardless if it fits the OSI definition, just like you can call any sparkling wine you want Champagne. It doesn't mean you'd be correct in doing so.
> So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much as accidentally used a copyrighted resource?
For a few reasons.
0. Because not only profitable large companies accidentally infringe on copyright (or copyleft). If for example OpenZFS somehow violated the GPL with the CDDL, you don't want someone using that to extort money from another free software project.
1. Because people using the GPL to extort money has already happened and it makes the GPL seem toxic. I love the GPL (GPLv2 or later), but it took me quite a bit of legwork to get it approved for use at my dayjob. The objections are based on FUD, and moves like this remove some of the FUD.
2. GPLv3 already has this clause. The FSF et al understood that it was good for the community AND good for the GPL. Extending this to GPLv2 brings the same good faith to projects that can't or won't re-license.
I understand the desire to be as punitive as the bad guys, but the FOSS community is too small to get away with tactics like that. Besides, you shouldn't even if you could. Free Software is fundamentally about community, and attacking people is anti-community.
> I thought it was primarily to remove the implicit assumption that free software was necessarily non-commercial.
I've heard Bruce Perens talk about it a few times, and even on the OSI website (https://opensource.org/history) they state...
"The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label "free software." Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term "open source", originally suggested by Christine Peterson."
You could be right though and some may have seen the non-commercial aspects of the word free as a tertiary benefit, but the primary stated goal was to distance itself from the ideals and politics of free software.
I agree with you though on the last part. Even as someone who uses the term free software, I often use the term open source while using search engines because searching free software brings up sites with freeware/adware/shareware and stuff I don't want. I also think using loan words like "libre" are a stretch for your general public. At work I tend to use "Free and Open Source Software".
Wasn't open source coined as a way to remove ideals from the discussion? This is why (as annoying as it gets sometimes) it's important to make the distinction between open source and free software. Free software has ideals.
It is very cool to see TechCrunch give some publicity to a product and project like this.
A few thoughts though. When I buy products like this, it's not to "stick it to the man". I would love major companies to provide freedom respecting hardware and software, and I would say most of the hackers I know feel that way. We just don't have many options. We'd have no problems supporting "corporate interests" that cared about free software and didn't mistreat their customers. Free software isn't about being anti-corporate, it's about being pro-freedom.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/atul-gawande/