Top all-time · #6346
Dieter Plaetinck
Personal blog · dieter.plaetinck.beprogrammingsystems
Dieter Plaetinck writes Dieter's blog, a personal blog at dieter.plaetinck.be about programming and systems. Since 2013, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Open Source undefined, part 1: the alternative origin story”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dieter Plaetinck's posts, mainly a deep-dive on the meaning of 'open source' and the luamail idea of a Lua-based mail client. Commenters cite them as background on open source and Lua tools.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Open Source undefined, part 1: the alternative origin story4 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2024-09-05
What Hacker News says?
> There's actually a lot of contrary evidence, see https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part ... for a great deep-dive. That author's findings line up with my own vague recollection of the occasional use of the terms "open" vs "closed" being used intuitively and generically to describe codebases, in programming-related discussions on bulletin board systems. Thanks for the link. I'm a bit blown awa…
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part
on “From where I left”Submitted Open Source undefined, part 1: the alternative origin story as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYou've made a lot of great points above, more than I can reply to, so please excuse my cherry-picking of just a few in my response here. > the term "open source" was not in any kind of widespread use prior to the explicit open source movement that began in 1998 There's actually a lot of contrary evidence, see https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part... for a great deep-dive. That author's finding…
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “From where I left”Submitted Open Source undefined, part 1: the alternative origin story as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is a neat hack on current technologies. Reminds me of uzbl [0] in the separation of modules, each one being good at only one thing and doing it well. What eventually killed uzbl [1] was the difficulties working with IPCs; I hope you overcome this and build something even greater ! [0] http://www.uzbl.org/readme.php [1] http://dieter.plaetinck.be/luamail_a_mail_client_built_into_...
Comment linking /luamail_a_mail_client_built_into_luakit.html
on “Show HN: Breach – A modular browser built on Chromium and Node.js”Submitted Open Source undefined, part 1: the alternative origin story as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Having adjectives that mean the same to everyone is very valuable, actually. Yes, and that's precisely why OSI should have invented a brand new term which they could trademark. But instead they co-opted "open source" which already had a clear, generic meaning of "the source code is available", previously without any connotations around specific license terms. And then due to that prior usage of the term, OSI can't…
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “Fun facts about SQLite”Submitted Open Source undefined, part 1: the alternative origin story as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere's another interesting read on "open source" and the OSI: https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part...
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “Fun facts about SQLite”Submitted Fair Source: the next best model for commercial open source? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> the term “Open Source” (as applied to software) was created by the OSI This is historical revisionism, and it's especially terrible that you'd call people "weasels" for correcting it. The term "open source" (as applied to software) was in-use prior to the existence of the OSI, and that's explicitly why the OSI wasn't able to obtain a trademark on the term. The term meant something roughly equivalent to how we use…
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “Open washing – why companies pretend to be open source”Submitted Restoring Git force push from GitHub without the commits locally as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlthough OSI claims that they coined the term, there's irrefutable proof that the term was already in-use well before that. Originally, "open source" just meant "source available": https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part...
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “Gumroad’s license wouldn’t meet the widely regarded definition of open source”Submitted Practical fault detection and alerting as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis project has been dead for some time, unfortunately. As has the more interesting idea the idea of a lua-based mail-client using Luakit: http://dieter.plaetinck.be/post/luamail_a_mail_client_built_... That said I did write a console-based mail-client with lua support: https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/
Comment linking /post/luamail_a_mail_client_built_into_luakit/
on “Luakit: Fast, small, WebKit-based browser framework extensible by Lua”Submitted On Graphite, Whisper and InfluxDB as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThey absolutely were NOT the first to apply the term to software in general. See https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part... for many proven uses of "open source" being used to describe source-available software prior to the OSI's existence. As for being the first to apply the term to software licenses , yes you're correct there. But that's the inherent source of this endless confusion: they took…
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “Open-Source Is Just That”Submitted Per-directory bash history as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPart of the background for this entire dispute is that prior to the OSI's founding, "open source" was a generic phrase which was broadly understood to just mean "the source code is available". See many documented cases in https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part... So it's a bit ironic to argue that terms cannot be redefined, when that's already what happened with "open source" and what got us he…
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?”Submitted Graphite-ng: A next-gen graphite server in Go as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> it's a little hard to use their name but argue I'm not "one of them." That's fair, but personally I can't see any reasonable fault with using "open source" in a way that strictly follows the definition in the OSD, and not this intangible unwritten social norm / movement stuff. If they wanted that to be a core part of it, it should have been in their definition to begin with. And even religiously following their de…
Comment linking /posts/open-source-undefined-part-1-the-alternative-origin-story/
on “Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community”
