Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/888291/

The Open Source Initiative reports
on a ruling in the US Court of Appeals reaffirming the meaning of “open
source” in a software license.

The court only confirmed what we already know – that “open source”
is a term of art for software that has been licensed under a
specific type of license, and whether a license is an OSI-approved
license is a critically important factor in user adoption of the
software. Had the defendants’ desire to license its software as
AGPLv3-only been permissible, its claims of “100% open source”
wouldn’t have been false and there would have been no false
advertising. But adding the non-free Commons Clause created a
different license such that the software could not be characterized
as “open source” and doing so in these circumstances was unlawful
false advertising.