> The broad distinction we care about within free software is copyleft vs. permissive
You are exactly correct about this.
1. Open-Source is a "Marketing Program for Free-Software". You describe yourself as having the "free-software" world view (which I describe as an anti-developer property worldview).
See: You can find OSI describe itself as a "Marketing Program for Free-Software" in their original FAQ: https://web.archive.org/web/20010406183942/http://opensource...
> The terms get harder because open/closed suggests straightforward opposites that partition all the options.
2. Again, you are exactly correct. By erroneously choosing term that is generic, that was already in use, and that can't be trademarked, the OSI set itself up for a loosing battle as "the universal standard" for what is not "closed-source".
GENERIC/DESCRIPTIVE: "We have discovered that there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark “open source”; the mark is too descriptive. Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success in bringing the “open source”
concept into the mainstream. So “Open Source” is not and cannot become a trademark.
https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
ALREADY IN USE: There are many documented uses of "open source" in relation to software that is not closed-source, going all the way back to 1985.
https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html#pre-1998-usage
> But I'd characterize licenses like BSL and the Fair Source License as 'generous proprietary licenses with public source availability', but not open-source.
As a person with a self-defined affiliation with free-software, it makes complete sense that you would see it this way, but how many people outside of the free-software group see that? The further someone is from self-affiliation with "free-software" surely the less likely they are to agree with this terminology.
> I have a feeling that the term 'open-source' is more likely to erode than 'free software', in the coming decades. We'll see, I guess.
I 100% agree with you. The OSI postulates a union between the interests of people who release software into the public domain, and the interests of people like yourself who believe in Free-Software.
In my view, there is nothing uniting these two groups and the fracture is 100% inevitable. Even if your preferred term `source-available` were to gain widespread acceptance/use, there is no reason for independent developers to subsidize big business by making their source free to use for those big businesses, unless the developers ideologically agree with the tenants of the free-software movement. However, if the developers agreed with the free-software movement, they would choose a GPL style license, not a MIT/BSD/Apache style public domain license.
