Sort of, if you’re writing a research paper or presentation or something like that with a lot of math in it, you can use Latex (for the whole thing, not just the formulas). It’s 10000X better than writing the same stuff in Word, especially if you know how to code
Well yes, but also no. You can’t reproduce a book because that violates copyrights.
Open source in this context just means that nobody owns the book, you can reproduce it however many times you want, and distribute it where you want as long as you include the original license in the reproduction (MIT license).
Also, there’s a bit of a colloquial understanding that others are able to contribute or fork the original source material.
But “open source” doesn’t even mean that you can reproduce it or use it for free. It just means that you can see the source code. The permissiveness, as you mentioned, lies in the licensing.
So I still think that it’s a complete misnomer.
But “open source” doesn’t even mean that you can reproduce it or use it for free.
You’re thinking of source-available licenses. Open source has a clear and widely accepted definition that requires a certain level of freedom. You’re free to ignore this definition, but you can’t expect the rest of the world to do the same.
To be clear, open source allows for only providing access to paying customers, but those paying customers are then free to use and distribute their copies without any further payment. Then it wouldn’t be open source anymore.
What’s an “open source” book? You don’t compile a book, aren’t they all “open source”? Do they list all the sources for their text or something?
The irony
I’m surprised this is still getting responses.
Fair jab, but I was obviously the computing term, implying “…from source code”.
Yeah, even in that sense… the irony
Ok I’ll stop being a prick 😂 if you haven’t used Latex before, you do write source code that gets compiled into PDF/PPT/whatever
I have some experience with Latex, but afaik, it’s mostly for writing mathematical formulas and stuff, no?
Sort of, if you’re writing a research paper or presentation or something like that with a lot of math in it, you can use Latex (for the whole thing, not just the formulas). It’s 10000X better than writing the same stuff in Word, especially if you know how to code
Well yes, but also no. You can’t reproduce a book because that violates copyrights.
Open source in this context just means that nobody owns the book, you can reproduce it however many times you want, and distribute it where you want as long as you include the original license in the reproduction (MIT license).
Also, there’s a bit of a colloquial understanding that others are able to contribute or fork the original source material.
But “open source” doesn’t even mean that you can reproduce it or use it for free. It just means that you can see the source code. The permissiveness, as you mentioned, lies in the licensing.
So I still think that it’s a complete misnomer.
You’re thinking of source-available licenses. Open source has a clear and widely accepted definition that requires a certain level of freedom. You’re free to ignore this definition, but you can’t expect the rest of the world to do the same.
To be clear, open source allows for only providing access to paying customers, but those paying customers are then free to use and distribute their copies without any further payment. Then it wouldn’t be open source anymore.