Open Source vs. open source vs. open-source vs. OpenSource

Good Governance Initiative
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A new issue on GGI gitlab was created to revisit how to write “open source”.

To share my point of view straight away:
I was in favour of simplicity with “open source”, arguing that open source became so common and popular, the advocacy for capitalised writing (see Bruce Perens article) was thankfully outdated. I like things smooth and simple and prefer lower case writing (still a C developer in heart I guess)

However, some interesting arguments were raised (@Silona): search engine indexing (which is why: InnerSource), and the need to identify more closely to the OSI Open Source Definition to help distinguish Open Source licences from new trendy not-Open Source licences such as SSPL or BSL

@flzara also mentioned in the issue that article on the use of open-source.

What’s your views ?

1 Like
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Hi there, as long as we are all using the same one in our content I am fine :slight_smile:

Usually in my day to day I am using Open Source and Inner Source but I can live with Camel case, SnowCase, HyphenCase, *.*Case :wink:

cheers

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In the 1st version of the Handbook, we decided to use “open source” - then I remember having fixed a lot of other variants, most of them being “open-source”.
Note I don’t care much about uniformity, and even didn’t notice any issue using both: simply, it was a community choice.

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If I have a strong opinion on having no hyphen (see the article linked by @nico.toussaint), I have a small preference for caps in “Open Source”, but I can happily live without the caps as long as it is consistent.