I have flipped and flopped back and forth on this, but nowadays I think it is worth reconsidering. I think the term "open source" is probably fine and it would be better to actually just double down on it. I'm not sure it could be much better than it is.

What you are saying is largely true: open source is defined to mean much more than what the two-word phrase actually implies intuitively. Fair point, and a common point of contention.

However, that's actually true of lots of domain-specific jargon in general. After all, language doesn't always have a succinct way to intuitively define specific concepts. It evolved naturally over time and surely largely out of necessity to be able to communicate effectively. Every language has blindspots, as well as oddly specific terms you wouldn't expect, like the perennially-cited Japanese term 「青木まりこ現象」(aoki marikogenshō) for the urge to defecate shortly after entering a book store.

When it comes to domain-specific terms, I think we have to accept that the there will sometimes be things where the layperson simply cannot intuitively understand the jargon no matter how its phrased. There's certainly not two words that can accurately explain what it means for something to be "open source" or "free software" according to the champions of said phrases. I mean, take for example, how many words Open Source Initiative has to spend on accurately defining it themselves[1]. Certainly it could be more terse, but no matter how you shake it there's just a lot of detail there.

So what happens is that jargon gets invented where if you know, you know. Sometimes jargon is just bullshit that could be replaced with much more obvious English, but I think often it really is just a lot of domain-specific stuff that can't be described sufficiently with short, simple phrases, so it winds up being bundled into less specific phrases. Does everyone really know what an "operating system" is? I'm not even sure if many computer scientists will agree on a definition for it. Yet, most people agree on which things are and are not operating systems somehow, and it remains an immensely useful term to describe a class of software that virtually everyone, including laypeople, often have a need to describe.

In that regard, I think "open-source software" is about as good as it possibly could be. As far as I could find when researching the topic, it was essentially a completely unused phrase before it was coined, and the people who coined it were very deliberate about giving it a very specific definition and tying it to a very specific movement; and most importantly, they defined rigorously what it was not, which wound up being very important.

I mean, we could call it something else, to be fair, like "free/libre and open-source software" or what have you, but the issue is that open-source is so well-known that it's somewhat understood by people with very little domain knowledge in software. I think the term open source has "stuck". It is true that not everyone really grasps what it means, but I think a lot of people, even if they couldn't define exactly what it means, sort of "get it" anyways. I think that many people who are not software developers have an intuitive understanding for the mutually beneficial nature of open-source software. Don't get me wrong, it's very clear that many people also do not: those people make themselves known in many ways, like being abusive on GitHub issue trackers.

I don't think we can get much more people to understand what open-source software actually is, at least not by force, so I think the better play is to defend the term we have. It's also totally fine, of course, if people want to use "expanded" terms like, again, "free/libre and open-source software", just to make it completely clear what they mean, but I suspect it's just too long and cumbersome to ever catch on the way the term open source itself has, and letting that term get diluted is a loss that will lead to confusion and manipulative behavior.

> For instance, your post calls things "shared source", which, to me, is a lot less clear of a description for the projects you're describing that way. ("Shared" how? Shared ownership? Or what?)

> I think "source available" is intuitive and fine (and better than "shared source"), but to me it's still a bit weirder. To me, it sounds like if you send the company an email, they might send you back a zip file with a bunch of source code. But most of these "source available" projects operate just like any other open source project.

To be honest, I only really use "shared source" because it feels like an analog to "open source". I have no particularly strong attachment to it and would be happy to call it "source available" or anything else. I do have roughly the same feelings though. "Source available" would be a strictly better term overall but I think this all suffers from the same problem that "open source" does: boiling a concept like this down to two words will never be perfect.

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd