OSI: Court affirms it's false advertising to claim software is Open Source when it’s not

The Open Source Initiative reportson a ruling in the US Court of Appeals reaffirming the meaning of "opensource" 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 aspecific type of license, and whether a license is an OSI-approvedlicense is a critically important factor in user adoption of thesoftware. Had the defendants' desire to license its software asAGPLv3-only been permissible, its claims of 100% open source"wouldn't have been false and there would have been no falseadvertising. But adding the non-free Commons Clause created adifferent license such that the software could not be characterizedas open source" and doing so in these circumstances was unlawfulfalse advertising.