> There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.
No, that's very much open source - in fact, it was the way most big name open source projects were developed back in the early days. See the famous "the cathedral and the bazaar" essay. Public bug trackers and widely soliciting contributions to mainline are relatively new phenomena, but you always had the right to fork and maintain and share your own fork, and that's the part that's essential.
I agree that it started that way, but that does not mean norms and expectations don't shift. To me, acting like it's 1980 is weird. The majority of maintained open source projects today are single-source-of-truth projects, not source code drops from unreachable invisible teams. There is a reason for that -- it's part of what makes the projects usable and dependable.
I think allowing the definition of open source to be muddled would be a big mistake, especially now that some entities are trying to whittle away users' rights while continuing to benefit from the positive vibes of open source. The OSDI/DFSG/FSF definition is a clear, simple line in the sand that has served the movement very well; there's no reason to change it. Yes some entities actively participate in their community and others do the bare minimum, but it's always going to be possible to be more or less communitarian.
No, that's very much open source - in fact, it was the way most big name open source projects were developed back in the early days. See the famous "the cathedral and the bazaar" essay. Public bug trackers and widely soliciting contributions to mainline are relatively new phenomena, but you always had the right to fork and maintain and share your own fork, and that's the part that's essential.