Open Washing

Open Washing, a term coined by Michelle Thorne, when it comes to FOSS is when a project, company or author presents a project as open source (or free software) while not actually providing it under the rights and commonly regarded definitions for those terms.

The term “open source” has a high reputation, a reputation which has been built up by the vast amount of software provided over decades under the rights afforded by the definition of that term. These open rights given away by software authors can often act as a risk, or at least impact their potential market advantage where needed.

Some projects & business desire to take the reputational advantage by marketing as open source, without the same risks, so they provide fewer and/or limited rights to users. This can result in users being misled, thinking they’re being provided more rights than the license text actually affords.

In most common scenarios of open washing, the project source code will be made available for viewing (source available), but there will be limitations to the open rights of use, modification & distribution which FOSS provides. Quite often, rights of redistribution will be the main target as projects attempt to avoid competition based upon their own work, especially as such rights reduction appears to have limited impact to most end users. That said, the result of this to end users is vendor lock-in; something FOSS does well to avoid through the success of forking, and something which has helped build the reputation of “open source”.