It certainly matters enough for there to have been endless of class action lawsuits and confused calls to customer support by customers wondering where their megabytes went. It's well-established common knowledge that the very visible confusion surrounding base 2 and base 10 measurements extends to storage and filesystems as well.
Not really. Storage, for example, is usually measured in powers of ten, while filesystems work in powers of two. It's rarely completely unambiguous without detailed knowledge of what the units are being applied to. Of course, if people would just use Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, etc. for powers of two, things would be a lot easier.
As commented on earlier, if an ISP is willing to deal with the many issues that will inevitably arise from arial fibre, doing so on a building-to-building or access layer switch-to-neighbourhood basis, they can do that, but the GP was talking about the things that a 2000 kilometre range on fibre connections would enable in rural areas, and you do not hang even 5 kilometres of fibre in the air if you have any sort of sanity, let alone hundreds of kilometres. Add to that the need to draw long fibre strands to feed one or two homes in rural areas, and the cost gets way too prohibitive.
Some ISPs may decide to risk hanging last mile fibre in the air. A completely stupid idea, but that's their choice. The thing is, we aren't talking last mile neighbourhood connections here. We're talking rural infrastructures. There is a HUGE difference.
The point of this article is absolutely nothing. "Look, we can put more capacity than any personal computer will be able to handle for at the very least a full decade into a single home". Great. It means absolutely nothing.
Copper is easy because copper can be carried above ground, and the infrastructure is already in place in rural areas. Pulling new copper above ground is also relatively cheap. Fibre does -not- like exposure to the elements, and it most certainly does NOT like hanging around in the air. Fibre is fragile. It goes in hardened, insulated tubes that are always in the ground.
In urban areas, fibre is a feasible solution as it is able to use existing city infrastructure to get where it needs to go in most places, and even where it can't, digging over relatively short distances isn't that much of a problem. If you were to do fibre to the home in rural areas, you would need HUGE digging projects to set up lines that would NEVER generate ANY profit no matter how much you charged for your service. Even then, this 2000 kilometre distance is absolutely meaningless as you would still need to create a hierarchical network with local access layer facilities in lieu of traditional copper COs connecting to regional distribution points feeding into a core network. The cost of building a rural fibre to the home infrastructure will probably never become feasible. Ever.
Last mile fibre to the home is no more difficult than establishing copper to the home in a typical urban environment.
When you're laying copper, you're running it to the CO. When you're laying fibre, you're running it to building/premises/neighbourhood access layer switches. The latter is a cheaper solution than building a fully-fledged CO. It's no significant hurdle compared to copper. Both need digging, and that's pretty much all there is to it. The ISP I work for does fibre to the home, and we have one of the best per-customer profit margins of all European ISPs. Last mile fibre to the home is -not- an insurmountable task.
In rural areas, copper is cheaper, but in rural areas, many people still only have 56k dial-up, too, and at that kind of bandwidth and latency, satellite connections are a much better choice anyway.
You've come full circle. First you deny that you are arguing that the Cambridge Dictionary is intentionally misleading users of its Advanced Learner's dictionaries, then you're saying that their definition is in direct contradiction to the definitions from other sources, and then you claim those to be correct.
If you consider a perfectly fitting, applicable and acceptable term like "nit-picker" to describe your initial reply as an "ad hominem" attack, then you seem to be insulted by your own behaviour, and with those two glaring lapses of logic, I'm going to retire from this completely pointless discussion.
Have fun being anal about things that clearly are completely irrelevant.
So now you're down to arguing that the information is "not complete" instead of inaccurate. The information in the Cambridge dictionary contradicts the information from your sources. That does not constitute a lack of "completeness" simply because it is an "advanced learner's" dictionary, it means that they are directly competing. The idea that this information should be incomplete and inaccurate for purposes of normal discussion are yours alone, and while you're evidently trying to pose it as factual, it's nothing more than a perception of yours that would be favourable to your argument if it was.
I'm sure you're trying to argue this from a legal point of view, where not all homicide is murder, but from a linguistic point of view, that is just not the case. Homicide is an act of murder, and that is a perfectly acceptable and widely agreed upon definition.
The fact of the matter is that this is all stemming from you not being able to rise above your disagreement with a choice of words made insiginificant by the fact that the actual message got across, and while you can link to PDFs all day long to argue a case that you cannot formulate yourself, that, as well as your distasteful ad hominem attacks make it pretty clear that if anyone is trolling here, it most certainly and without any objective doubt, is you.
No, you're postulating that they're misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries.
They're advertising that they're including simplified defintions. Simplified defintions are not necessarily incorrect, and they certainly are not when the purpose of the dictionaries is *teaching*, which by definition requires the information to be correct and accurate. You're desperately trying to argue that a publisher as established as Cambridge Press would compromise their professional integrity and create dictionaries with inaccurate definitions for the purpose of teaching, because it's supposedly easier to teach things that are incorrect. That's just absurdly ridiculous.
You're grasping for straws here, and it's pretty sad.
If the best you can do postulate a something as absurd as that Cambridge Press are intentionally misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries, then you're obviously in over your head. Even the Cambridge Dictionary of American English returns the same definition.
If all you're good for is failed logic and personal attacks, I'd suggest you crawl back under your bridge.
While I'm sure that the amount of expletives in your post corresponds with your arrogant and unshakable belief that you're right, I'm sorry to say to you that murder and homicide are precisely the same. What you're looking for is "justifiable homicide", but in legalese, there's also "justifiable murder".
All those expletives. If you had been right, you could take comfort in that to offset you coming off as a 14 year old. Now you don't even have that.
homicide Show phonetics noun [C or U] US FORMAL OR LEGAL (an act of) murder: He was convicted of homicide. The number of homicides in the city has risen sharply.
homicidal Show phonetics adjective likely to murder: a homicidal maniac
Unfortunately, your position is that you need to both practice your spelling, and find a better dictionary. I'm sure most people can agree that the Cambridge dictionary is infinitely more authoritative as dictionary of the Engish language than both the "American Heritage" and that cesspool of words they call Merriam Webster.
Congratulations, you're a nit-picker. You obviously knew what I meant.
To follow in your footsteps, it's actually "homicide", and homicide is defined as "an act of murder", so your "correction" means precisely the same as the word you "corrected".
That ridiculous. It's like saying that murder is unethical regardless of the circumstances.
If you go kill someone for the hell of it, of course it's unethical, but if you kill someone through unavoidable accident, there's not really any unethical aspect to consider.
Likewise, if you go download a CD because, hey, you'll save some money, then of course that's unethical, but if you go download a CD because, hey, you appreciate the song, but not to the point where you'd ever buy it, the record labels are left with no loss of profit, and you're left with a song you'll hear once in a while and perhaps grow to like enough to follow the artist and perhaps buy another of their CDs.
I don't see any logical reason for why something that incurs no loss, hinderance or anguish, neither financial nor personal, should be considered unethical. Do you?
Actually, I'm not at all having trouble with grasping any of your statements. What's wrong here is apparently that I assumed that you were arguing on topic, and replied to it as such, when you were in reality just chiming in with irrelevant noise. Oh well.
I'd tell you about how you can't enforce licensing on something that isn't your legal property, but you seem to be having trouble understanding what legal property actually is.
You assume that legal property can only be of a tangible nature. That is a hugely incorrect assumption. The money I have in the bank are bits in a database somewhere. It is, however, still my legal property.
It has been proven time and time again that arguing that you have the right to modify software because of some wrongful perception that legal property has to be tangible is completely wrong. Not that it's relevant though. The point is that you don't own the required license to alter the software, so it doesn't matter how many times you apply your remarkably astute powers of deduction to the comparison of a car and bits and bytes on a storage media and come to the stunning conclusion that they don't share any considerable physical traits. Legally, it's completely, wholly and entirely irrelevant.
You do not own most of the software you have. You own a license to use it, but you don't own the software. If I lend you something, I give you a license to use it, but you don't own it. Don't confuse buying a license with owning an object. Don't confuse property rights with laws limiting the use of data, either. This has nothing to do with any law limiting the use of data. It has to do with intellectual property, meaning property laws apply.
Physical manifestation is not a prerequisite for licensing, and even if it was, the software still has a physical manifestation on your storage media. If there was no physical manifestation, there would be no software. It's irrelevant to the contract you sign into when you buy a license for a particular piece of software, however, but some people seem to refuse to accept that that's how the law works, and think that laws only govern tangible objects. That is not the case.
If you had bought your software, you would be free to tinker with it. Naturally. That's your right. You don't buy most software, though, so your argument is completely invalid, inapplicable, and, I'm sorry to say, frankly quite inane.
Maybe, but the FSF, Apache guys, BSD guys and other free software providers respect them nonetheless, so I for one would rather do business with them than with the guys who won't.
I don't think you understood what I said. You have no "software freedom", so there's nothing to "respect". They could grant you the freedom of being able to mess with their code, but it is not a general freedom ensured by any sort of authority, so they can't "respect" it.
Seems to me that I have the freedom to mess around with the code of these programs, then. The word fits perfectly, with all the connotations it has.
You have been granted the right to mess around with the code. "Freedom" when expected connotes that something is, well, an established and ensured freedom that you have, which it is not. When you say "respecting software freedom", it connotes the same as "respecting freedom of speech" does, which is that not respecting it is a Bad Thing(tm). I'm sure whoever comes up with these absurd statements would like things to be that way, but things just are not like that.
First of all, the freedom to tinker with your possessions is the natural state of affairs. It is the copyright lobby with their "do not reverse engineer or modify" EULAs, CD checks, invasive installation programs - which may attempt to disable legitimate software, such as Daemon Tools, in your computer - and sometimes outright malware distribution - I'm referring to Sony, of course - who have delusions of entitlement.
No, it is not a natural state of affairs. I may lend you an item, but if you tinker with it and modify it, you're liable in the case that I do not agree with the changes you made. Likewise, software developers lend you their code, but if you tinker with it and modify it, you're liable for any damages they may demand. The only difference between these two scenarios is that one of the contracts is expressive, and the other is implied. They're both legally binding. It doesn't matter if the code was "just a copy". My item was "just a copy" of a blueprint that the manufacturer developed, too.
Second, since the GNU project - as well as numerous other free software providers - not only still exists but is in fact gaining popularity all the time, it seems to me that the ideologue works perfectly fine in reality, so please explain what makes them "unrealistic" ?
Because "free software" accounts for a minimal part of a software market dominated by closed source applications. Perhaps in ten years, trying to make "software freedom" ubiquitous through verbal propaganda might actually be successful, but trying to change a multi-billion dollar industry by introducing that kind of drivel is just ridiculous.
Third, please explain your statement concerning force - has Stallman sent hit squads to break peoples kneecaps if they don't release under the GPL ? Or is this another case of someone thinking they should be able to use GPL'd code without adhering to the licensing terms of the GPL ?
I think you wholly misunderstand the meaning of "force" in this context. That, or you're very narrow-minded.
Fourth, if you truly think that freedom is the lowest common denominator... You are in for a very rude awakening;(.
Freedom is the absolute lowest common denominator. It is the basis for human rights. Appealing to people's desire for freedom is appealing to the lowest common denominator. If you think that this isn't so, then I'm afraid that you're sheltered from reality, and that you're the one who's in for a rude awakening.
You don't have any "software freedoms" that anyone needs to respect. Some developers just let you mess around in their code. Labeling it a "freedom" with all the connotations that word has is just a cheap marketing ploy.
Don't fool yourself into delusions of entitlement just because a group of people with unrealistic ideologies want to force theirs onto others by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Elitist? I don't even know if I use any open source software at all right now. No need for the ad hominem attacks.
Comparing "organic" food with "open source" software is comparing apples to oranges (yes, it had to be done.) The general perception of what "open source" is, is immediately tangible to anyone who would care, and as such, easily discernable from false advertisement. "Organic" food is not. When you're buying "organic" food, you have no choice but to trust the label. When you're buying software, however, you have every opportunity to examine whether a claim of being "open source" is true or not, and if you buy an "open source" product because of a sticker on a box, and find the license to be too restrictive for you, then yes, you are an idiot, and you deserve whatever you get.
*Everything* is free to be interpreted by the user. When a company pushes its products as being the "most ever!", you're free to interpret that. It might be mislabled to you, yes, but to someone else, it might be right on the money. A license may not be considered "open source" by the OSI, but to some users, it might be precisely what they consider to be "open source". It's free to be interpreted by the user.
If I tell you that your post isn't intelligent, it's not because I'm trying to monopolise the "market" for the word "intelligent", it's because the word "intelligent" has a meaning which does not apply here. If I tell you that your post isn't intelligent, and then attempt to force my definition of "intelligent" on you and make you withdraw or alter your comment because of it, then yes, I would most certainly be attempting to monopolise the "market" for the word "intelligence", and this is precisely what the OSI is trying to do with the term "open source".
Corporations have been decieving and misleading their customers with inaccurate descriptions with impunity for decades. This is nothing new. We don't need some vigilante organisation attempting to monopolise the definition of a term that already has a market built up around it. An "OSI approved open source product!" sticker on a box is not going to make me any more likely to buy that product over one that claims to "just" be "open source".
If the term described an industry specification, and if the OSI were key to it in any real way, they could label it whatever they want. The thing is that no matter how many people or organisations try to claim that their definition is the "correct open source definition", the term will never be subject to any one definition. Any centralised license approval will be completely worthless, and frankly quite ridiculous.
Of course a user can apply their own interpretation of "open source" on a closed source license. It's as simple as saying "Hey, this closed source license doesn't really conform with what I consider to be open source."
That's all there is to it. If you need little stickers saying "OSI approved!" on the box of any "open source" software you buy, you're pretty much an idiot anyway.
Microsoft is free to do that if they wish. The thing about open source being open to interpretation by the user is that the user is free to decide of any given piece of software is compatible with their own interpretation of the term. If they choose not to use that freedom, and decide to just buy whatever has a little "open source" logo on it, then the problem is not with the definition, but with the user.
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It certainly matters enough for there to have been endless of class action lawsuits and confused calls to customer support by customers wondering where their megabytes went. It's well-established common knowledge that the very visible confusion surrounding base 2 and base 10 measurements extends to storage and filesystems as well.
Downloading files and buying computers is something that laymen do, so it is most certainly does fall within that category.
Not really. Storage, for example, is usually measured in powers of ten, while filesystems work in powers of two. It's rarely completely unambiguous without detailed knowledge of what the units are being applied to. Of course, if people would just use Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, etc. for powers of two, things would be a lot easier.
As commented on earlier, if an ISP is willing to deal with the many issues that will inevitably arise from arial fibre, doing so on a building-to-building or access layer switch-to-neighbourhood basis, they can do that, but the GP was talking about the things that a 2000 kilometre range on fibre connections would enable in rural areas, and you do not hang even 5 kilometres of fibre in the air if you have any sort of sanity, let alone hundreds of kilometres. Add to that the need to draw long fibre strands to feed one or two homes in rural areas, and the cost gets way too prohibitive.
Some ISPs may decide to risk hanging last mile fibre in the air. A completely stupid idea, but that's their choice. The thing is, we aren't talking last mile neighbourhood connections here. We're talking rural infrastructures. There is a HUGE difference.
The point of this article is absolutely nothing. "Look, we can put more capacity than any personal computer will be able to handle for at the very least a full decade into a single home". Great. It means absolutely nothing.
Copper is easy because copper can be carried above ground, and the infrastructure is already in place in rural areas. Pulling new copper above ground is also relatively cheap. Fibre does -not- like exposure to the elements, and it most certainly does NOT like hanging around in the air. Fibre is fragile. It goes in hardened, insulated tubes that are always in the ground.
In urban areas, fibre is a feasible solution as it is able to use existing city infrastructure to get where it needs to go in most places, and even where it can't, digging over relatively short distances isn't that much of a problem. If you were to do fibre to the home in rural areas, you would need HUGE digging projects to set up lines that would NEVER generate ANY profit no matter how much you charged for your service. Even then, this 2000 kilometre distance is absolutely meaningless as you would still need to create a hierarchical network with local access layer facilities in lieu of traditional copper COs connecting to regional distribution points feeding into a core network. The cost of building a rural fibre to the home infrastructure will probably never become feasible. Ever.
Last mile fibre to the home is no more difficult than establishing copper to the home in a typical urban environment.
When you're laying copper, you're running it to the CO. When you're laying fibre, you're running it to building/premises/neighbourhood access layer switches. The latter is a cheaper solution than building a fully-fledged CO. It's no significant hurdle compared to copper. Both need digging, and that's pretty much all there is to it. The ISP I work for does fibre to the home, and we have one of the best per-customer profit margins of all European ISPs. Last mile fibre to the home is -not- an insurmountable task.
In rural areas, copper is cheaper, but in rural areas, many people still only have 56k dial-up, too, and at that kind of bandwidth and latency, satellite connections are a much better choice anyway.
You've come full circle. First you deny that you are arguing that the Cambridge Dictionary is intentionally misleading users of its Advanced Learner's dictionaries, then you're saying that their definition is in direct contradiction to the definitions from other sources, and then you claim those to be correct.
If you consider a perfectly fitting, applicable and acceptable term like "nit-picker" to describe your initial reply as an "ad hominem" attack, then you seem to be insulted by your own behaviour, and with those two glaring lapses of logic, I'm going to retire from this completely pointless discussion.
Have fun being anal about things that clearly are completely irrelevant.
So now you're down to arguing that the information is "not complete" instead of inaccurate. The information in the Cambridge dictionary contradicts the information from your sources. That does not constitute a lack of "completeness" simply because it is an "advanced learner's" dictionary, it means that they are directly competing. The idea that this information should be incomplete and inaccurate for purposes of normal discussion are yours alone, and while you're evidently trying to pose it as factual, it's nothing more than a perception of yours that would be favourable to your argument if it was.
I'm sure you're trying to argue this from a legal point of view, where not all homicide is murder, but from a linguistic point of view, that is just not the case. Homicide is an act of murder, and that is a perfectly acceptable and widely agreed upon definition.
The fact of the matter is that this is all stemming from you not being able to rise above your disagreement with a choice of words made insiginificant by the fact that the actual message got across, and while you can link to PDFs all day long to argue a case that you cannot formulate yourself, that, as well as your distasteful ad hominem attacks make it pretty clear that if anyone is trolling here, it most certainly and without any objective doubt, is you.
No, you're postulating that they're misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries.
They're advertising that they're including simplified defintions. Simplified defintions are not necessarily incorrect, and they certainly are not when the purpose of the dictionaries is *teaching*, which by definition requires the information to be correct and accurate. You're desperately trying to argue that a publisher as established as Cambridge Press would compromise their professional integrity and create dictionaries with inaccurate definitions for the purpose of teaching, because it's supposedly easier to teach things that are incorrect. That's just absurdly ridiculous.
You're grasping for straws here, and it's pretty sad.
If the best you can do postulate a something as absurd as that Cambridge Press are intentionally misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries, then you're obviously in over your head. Even the Cambridge Dictionary of American English returns the same definition.
If all you're good for is failed logic and personal attacks, I'd suggest you crawl back under your bridge.
Through your post you managed to end up with comparing "negligent killing" and "intentional killing" to make your point.
An unavoidable accident is never the result of negligence.
While I'm sure that the amount of expletives in your post corresponds with your arrogant and unshakable belief that you're right, I'm sorry to say to you that murder and homicide are precisely the same. What you're looking for is "justifiable homicide", but in legalese, there's also "justifiable murder".
All those expletives. If you had been right, you could take comfort in that to offset you coming off as a 14 year old. Now you don't even have that.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=376 81&dict=CALD
homicide Show phonetics
noun [C or U] US FORMAL OR LEGAL
(an act of) murder:
He was convicted of homicide.
The number of homicides in the city has risen sharply.
homicidal Show phonetics
adjective
likely to murder:
a homicidal maniac
Unfortunately, your position is that you need to both practice your spelling, and find a better dictionary. I'm sure most people can agree that the Cambridge dictionary is infinitely more authoritative as dictionary of the Engish language than both the "American Heritage" and that cesspool of words they call Merriam Webster.
Congratulations, you're a nit-picker. You obviously knew what I meant.
To follow in your footsteps, it's actually "homicide", and homicide is defined as "an act of murder", so your "correction" means precisely the same as the word you "corrected".
That ridiculous. It's like saying that murder is unethical regardless of the circumstances.
If you go kill someone for the hell of it, of course it's unethical, but if you kill someone through unavoidable accident, there's not really any unethical aspect to consider.
Likewise, if you go download a CD because, hey, you'll save some money, then of course that's unethical, but if you go download a CD because, hey, you appreciate the song, but not to the point where you'd ever buy it, the record labels are left with no loss of profit, and you're left with a song you'll hear once in a while and perhaps grow to like enough to follow the artist and perhaps buy another of their CDs.
I don't see any logical reason for why something that incurs no loss, hinderance or anguish, neither financial nor personal, should be considered unethical. Do you?
Actually, I'm not at all having trouble with grasping any of your statements. What's wrong here is apparently that I assumed that you were arguing on topic, and replied to it as such, when you were in reality just chiming in with irrelevant noise. Oh well.
I'd tell you about how you can't enforce licensing on something that isn't your legal property, but you seem to be having trouble understanding what legal property actually is.
The only confusion here is yours.
You assume that legal property can only be of a tangible nature. That is a hugely incorrect assumption. The money I have in the bank are bits in a database somewhere. It is, however, still my legal property.
It has been proven time and time again that arguing that you have the right to modify software because of some wrongful perception that legal property has to be tangible is completely wrong. Not that it's relevant though. The point is that you don't own the required license to alter the software, so it doesn't matter how many times you apply your remarkably astute powers of deduction to the comparison of a car and bits and bytes on a storage media and come to the stunning conclusion that they don't share any considerable physical traits. Legally, it's completely, wholly and entirely irrelevant.
I thought this had been debated to death already.
You do not own most of the software you have. You own a license to use it, but you don't own the software. If I lend you something, I give you a license to use it, but you don't own it. Don't confuse buying a license with owning an object. Don't confuse property rights with laws limiting the use of data, either. This has nothing to do with any law limiting the use of data. It has to do with intellectual property, meaning property laws apply.
Physical manifestation is not a prerequisite for licensing, and even if it was, the software still has a physical manifestation on your storage media. If there was no physical manifestation, there would be no software. It's irrelevant to the contract you sign into when you buy a license for a particular piece of software, however, but some people seem to refuse to accept that that's how the law works, and think that laws only govern tangible objects. That is not the case.
If you had bought your software, you would be free to tinker with it. Naturally. That's your right. You don't buy most software, though, so your argument is completely invalid, inapplicable, and, I'm sorry to say, frankly quite inane.
I don't think you understood what I said. You have no "software freedom", so there's nothing to "respect". They could grant you the freedom of being able to mess with their code, but it is not a general freedom ensured by any sort of authority, so they can't "respect" it.
You have been granted the right to mess around with the code. "Freedom" when expected connotes that something is, well, an established and ensured freedom that you have, which it is not. When you say "respecting software freedom", it connotes the same as "respecting freedom of speech" does, which is that not respecting it is a Bad Thing(tm). I'm sure whoever comes up with these absurd statements would like things to be that way, but things just are not like that.
No, it is not a natural state of affairs. I may lend you an item, but if you tinker with it and modify it, you're liable in the case that I do not agree with the changes you made. Likewise, software developers lend you their code, but if you tinker with it and modify it, you're liable for any damages they may demand. The only difference between these two scenarios is that one of the contracts is expressive, and the other is implied. They're both legally binding. It doesn't matter if the code was "just a copy". My item was "just a copy" of a blueprint that the manufacturer developed, too.
Because "free software" accounts for a minimal part of a software market dominated by closed source applications. Perhaps in ten years, trying to make "software freedom" ubiquitous through verbal propaganda might actually be successful, but trying to change a multi-billion dollar industry by introducing that kind of drivel is just ridiculous.
I think you wholly misunderstand the meaning of "force" in this context. That, or you're very narrow-minded.
Freedom is the absolute lowest common denominator. It is the basis for human rights. Appealing to people's desire for freedom is appealing to the lowest common denominator. If you think that this isn't so, then I'm afraid that you're sheltered from reality, and that you're the one who's in for a rude awakening.
You don't have any "software freedoms" that anyone needs to respect. Some developers just let you mess around in their code. Labeling it a "freedom" with all the connotations that word has is just a cheap marketing ploy.
Don't fool yourself into delusions of entitlement just because a group of people with unrealistic ideologies want to force theirs onto others by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Elitist? I don't even know if I use any open source software at all right now. No need for the ad hominem attacks.
Comparing "organic" food with "open source" software is comparing apples to oranges (yes, it had to be done.) The general perception of what "open source" is, is immediately tangible to anyone who would care, and as such, easily discernable from false advertisement. "Organic" food is not. When you're buying "organic" food, you have no choice but to trust the label. When you're buying software, however, you have every opportunity to examine whether a claim of being "open source" is true or not, and if you buy an "open source" product because of a sticker on a box, and find the license to be too restrictive for you, then yes, you are an idiot, and you deserve whatever you get.
*Everything* is free to be interpreted by the user. When a company pushes its products as being the "most ever!", you're free to interpret that. It might be mislabled to you, yes, but to someone else, it might be right on the money. A license may not be considered "open source" by the OSI, but to some users, it might be precisely what they consider to be "open source". It's free to be interpreted by the user.
If I tell you that your post isn't intelligent, it's not because I'm trying to monopolise the "market" for the word "intelligent", it's because the word "intelligent" has a meaning which does not apply here. If I tell you that your post isn't intelligent, and then attempt to force my definition of "intelligent" on you and make you withdraw or alter your comment because of it, then yes, I would most certainly be attempting to monopolise the "market" for the word "intelligence", and this is precisely what the OSI is trying to do with the term "open source".
Corporations have been decieving and misleading their customers with inaccurate descriptions with impunity for decades. This is nothing new. We don't need some vigilante organisation attempting to monopolise the definition of a term that already has a market built up around it. An "OSI approved open source product!" sticker on a box is not going to make me any more likely to buy that product over one that claims to "just" be "open source".
If the term described an industry specification, and if the OSI were key to it in any real way, they could label it whatever they want. The thing is that no matter how many people or organisations try to claim that their definition is the "correct open source definition", the term will never be subject to any one definition. Any centralised license approval will be completely worthless, and frankly quite ridiculous.
Of course a user can apply their own interpretation of "open source" on a closed source license. It's as simple as saying "Hey, this closed source license doesn't really conform with what I consider to be open source."
That's all there is to it. If you need little stickers saying "OSI approved!" on the box of any "open source" software you buy, you're pretty much an idiot anyway.
Microsoft is free to do that if they wish. The thing about open source being open to interpretation by the user is that the user is free to decide of any given piece of software is compatible with their own interpretation of the term. If they choose not to use that freedom, and decide to just buy whatever has a little "open source" logo on it, then the problem is not with the definition, but with the user.