Is “Open Source” ever hyphenated?

Favorite

No! Open Source is never hyphenated when referring to software. If you’re familiar with English grammar you may have more than an eyebrow raised: read on, we have an explanation. Actually, we have two. 

We asked Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss, a linguist and KDE’s project manager, to provide us with an explanation. If that’s not enough, we have one more argument at the end of this post. 

Why Open Source is not hyphenated

In summary:

• “open source” (no hyphen) is a lexicalized compound noun which is no longer transparent with respect to its meaning (i.e., open source is not just about being source-viewable, but also about defining user freedoms) which can then be further compounded (with for example “open source license”);
• by contrast, “open-source” (with a hyphen) is a compound modifier modifying the head noun (e.g. “intelligence”) with open having a standard dictionary meaning (i.e., “transparent” or “open to or in view of all”).

Open Source as a lexicalized compound noun

“Open source” is a lexicalized compound noun.  Although it originates with the phrase “open source software”, today “open source” is itself a unique lexeme. An example, in Red Hat’s article:

Open source has become a movement and a way of working that reaches beyond software production.

The word open in “open source” does not have the meaning “open” as one would find in the dictionary. Instead, “open source” also entails user freedoms, inasmuch as users of the software for any purpose do not have to negotiate with the rights owners to enjoy (use/improve/share/monetise) the software. That is, it is not only about transparency.

A natural example of this usage, in which the phrase open source license is clearly about more than just licensing transparency:

Because Linux is released under an open source license, which prevents restrictions on the use of the software, anyone can run, study, modify, and redistribute the source code, or even sell copies of their modified code, as long as they do so under the same license.” (from Red Hat website https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source)

Note that “open source license” is itself a compound noun phrase made up of the lexicalized compound noun “open source” + the noun “license”; same for “open source movement”, etc.

What is lexicalization?

According to the Lexicon of linguistics (Utrecht University), ‘lexicalization’ is a “phenomenon by which a morphologically complex word starts to behave like an underived word in some respect, which means that at least one feature (semantic, syntactic, or phonological) becomes unpredictable”.

Underived word here means the phrase has a specific, unique meaning not (necessarily) transparent from its component parts. For instance, a “black market” is not a market which is black but rather a specific kind of market: an illegal one. A “blackboard” can be green. In other words, the entire complex phrase can be treated as a single unit of meaning stored in the mental lexicon. The meaning of the phrase is not derived using grammatical rules.

Today, the meaning of open source is unpredictable or semantically intransparent given its usage (at least by a subset of speakers) and meaning, i.e., open source is about user freedoms, not just transparency.

Other examples of lexicalized compound nouns include “yellow journalism”, “purple prose”, “dirty bomb”, “fat chance”, “green card”, “blackbird”, “greenhouse”, “high school”, etc. I tried to think of examples which are composed of adjectives + nouns but with a specific meaning not derivable by the combination of the two. I am sure you can come up with many more!

In some cases, lexicalization results in writing the compound noun phrase together as a single word (‘blackboard’), in other cases not (‘green card’). One can also build larger phrases by combining the lexicalized compound noun with another noun (e.g., black market dealer, green card holder).

Hyphenated open-source is a compound modifier

By contrast, open in “open-source intelligence” is the dictionary meaning of “open”, i.e., “open to or in view of all” or “transparent”. In this case, open-source is a compound modifier/compound adjective with a meaning comparable to “source-viewable”, “source-available”, “source-transparent”.

For compound modifiers, the hyphenation, though not obligatory, is common and can be used to disambiguate.  The presence of a head noun like “intelligence” or “journalism” is obligatory for the compound-modifier use of open-source, unlike in lexicalized compounds.

Examples of other compound modifiers + a head noun: “long-term contract”, “single-word modifier”, “high-volume printer”, etc.

Examples

There are some examples of  the compound-modifier use on Wikipedia where I think the difference between meanings lexicalized compound noun and compound modifier becomes clear:

“Open-source journalism, a close cousin to citizen journalism or participatory journalism, is a term coined in the title of a 1999 article by Andrew Leonard of Salon.com.” (from Wikipedia)

“Open-source intelligence” is intelligence “produced from publicly available information that is collected, exploited, and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for the purpose of addressing a specific intelligence requirement” (from Wikipedia)

In these examples open-source is clearly referring to transparent, viewable-to-all sources and not to something like ‘guaranteeing user freedoms’. Moreover, my intuition for these latter examples is that removing the hyphen would change the meaning, however subtle it may be, and the change could make the original sentences incoherent (without implicit internal modification while reading):

•  “open source journalism” would refer to journalism about open source software (in sense I above), not transparent, participatory journalism;
• “open source intelligence” would refer to intelligence about open source software (in sense I above, whatever that would mean!), not intelligence from publicly available information.

The Open Source Initiative says: No hyphen!

If that explanation still doesn’t convince you, we invoke the rules of branding and “pull a Twitter”, who vandalized English with their Who To Follow : we say no hyphen!

Luckily others have already adopted the “no hyphen” camp, like the CNCF style guide. Debate closed.

If you like debates, let’s talk about capitalization: OSI in its guidelines chose to always capitalize Open Source because it is a proper noun with a specific definition. Which camp are you on?

Click Here to View Original Source (opensource.org)