“Open source” is when sources are open, i.e. available to anyone. That’s literally in the name. FSF/OSI traditionally reassign the meaning in their own scope and have a process of approval, probably for a good reason. Also some people will resist and blame you for being “misleading” with your “open source”. But you definitely can have an open source non-free non-modifyable project. There’s no law of physics which could stop you, nor legal laws which prohibit combining words into meaningful sentences. Just make a proprietary app with all legal remarks and open the sources by publishing them somewhere.

> FSF/OSI traditionally reassign the meaning in their own scope and have a process of approval, probably for a good reason. Also some people will resist and blame you for being “misleading” with your “open source”. But you definitely can have an open source non-free non-modifyable project.

They did not "reassign the meaning". They created the term, it did not exist before their usage. They created it to mean the thing you're now saying it doesn't mean.

There’s more to the story, afaik. But my main point is that it’s unreasonable to take two existing words and claim it’s impossible to combine them directly. Not gonna argue or flamebait though, please just tell the correct term for projects with open source but non-free-software license and I’ll be happy to use it from now on.

> But my main point is that it’s unreasonable to take two existing words and claim it’s impossible to combine them directly.

There's terms that if you attempt to use the literal meaning of the component words, you'll confuse people. This is one. It's like a trademark or an idiom, it has extra meaning beyond the literal due to cultural association.

> Not gonna argue or flamebait though, please just tell the correct term for projects with open source but non-free-software license and I’ll be happy to use it from now on.

I've seen "source available" used and that always seemed fine to me.

Looks fine to me, thanks!

It’s not possible to reserve terms which are made up from generic words. That’s neither true in trademark law (for good reason), nor anywhere else. Saying “free software” or “open-source software” doesn’t require any upfront definition, both phrases can be understood perfectly intuitively: “free” as in “free of charge” and “open-source” as in “the source code is openly available”.

OSI/FSF decided to use generic words as label to promote their specific ideas. The ambiguity of that unspecific wording choice is on them, not on the rest of the world.

The definition of short phrases is not some intuitive prescriptive "the components mean this", but rather it is what we have collectively agreed on the meaning to be. Open Source and Free Software are widely collectively agreed upon terms of art, so they're not ambiguous.

Just because "gravy boat" has the word boat in it does not mean it is actually a real boat. "Whisky on the rocks" has ice in it, not actual rocks.

Free Software and Open Source Software have widely agreed upon meanings, and just because you think intuitively it would make more sense for "whisky on the rocks" to be served over actual rocks doesn't mean you're better at understanding english words than the rest of us.

> but rather it is what we have collectively agreed on the meaning to be.

Who is “we”?

My point is that I don’t think that your premise of “collective agreement” is true for “open source” or “free software”. I don’t agree with it, and I know a bunch of other people that don’t do either.

> Who is “we”?

Language is cultural and context-specific. Not everyone has to agree, but if you talk to software people about "open source" and don't mean what everybody else means, you're just going to confuse and annoy people instead of communicating.

> Language is cultural and context-specific.

Language is not set in stone either, and the perception of what terms mean may change over time, even within one and the same cultural context. That’s why we are having debates and discussions. The world of computer people is no exception of this phenomenon – the etymology of the word “computer” is a literal example for that.

You could have a license that's open source in all respects but this one.

However, someone could make a change, redistribute under the same term, and then someone else could undo the change, and redistribute, essentially redistributing the original without modification.