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The term “open source” might have originated with a particular meaning in mind, but I think OP’s point is that the term developed a life on its own thereafter.

“Cheerios” is a made-up product name, and without knowing the definition of it, one couldn’t tell what it means. (I had to look it up, in fact.) In contrast, “open” and “source” are generic words, and in combination they can be used and understood without knowing any of the FOSS history.

That’s actually how I was introduced to the term: I always understood “open source” to just literally mean “the source code is openly accessible” – no more, no less. Even after having learned about the FOSS aspect later on, I continued to interpret “open source” in that literal sense.

Since this debate is a bit … heated, let me add that I’m not interested in making any general claims with my statement – I’m rather sharing my own perception to contribute a data point to how language can be used and understood differently, depending on where people come from.

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But "open source" is also a made up name, just like Cheerios. Nobody was using the term "open source" before it was deliberately created in Palo Alto. The fact that you thought you knew what it meant without being given a definition, and what you thought was incorrect, might be considered a weakness of the term. But it doesn't change the nature of the name.

> The fact that you thought you knew what it meant without being given a definition

“Open source” can be legitimately used as generic term, and as such one doesn’t need any definition at all to use the term in its colloquial sense.

Imagine someone were to arbitrarily define the term “free lunch” to mean something very specific, instead of the naive interpretation of “a meal at noon that you don’t have to pay for”. Only because they’d claim and publish their definition doesn’t make it universal from then on, regardless of whether the combination of those words had been used somewhere else before.

If you think of patent law, for example, it’s not for nothing that you can’t claim a trademark on generic terms. The reasoning behind that stems from the very same problem.

I agree with you that it probably would have been better if the FOSS movement had established a more specific term for what they meant. (Like: “FOSS”, for example.) But – to put it bluntly – that’s a home-made problem on behalf of the FOSS movement, and not mine.

The comparison to "free lunch" doesn't really make sense. The phrase "free lunch" has been used for what it transparently means since forever.

Nobody used the term "open source" before it was deliberately invented. There was plenty of software in the 80s and 90s that we could retroactively call "open source," but nobody used that phrase at the time. The phrase "open source" was specifically created in 1998 because the term then in common use, "free software," was too generic and people were confused about what it meant. So a new term was created for the express purpose to have a term with no prior meaning so that a specific meaning could be assigned to it.

You seem to think that because "open source" is a phrase you see a lot, it's a generic phrase that was always used informally and grew out of natural language. But that's not the case. It's a term of art that was artificially created with a specific meaning.

The discussion is pointless. I know the history around the term, and yet, I – and many people that I know – don’t attribute any relevance to it in regards to their usage of that term. If people choose to use the phrase “open source” in a colloquial, literal way, then they are free to do so. Nobody can change that.