>> that's on the definers.

Is it though? What about farming? Does each farmer get to decide what "organic" means? Does every shoe manufacturer get to decide what "Ethically Sourced" stands for? I'm not so comfortable with the argument that "well, it means whatever the hearer wants it to mean, and if they get it wrong that's because it was defined badly?"

I don't think "Free Software" is a terribly intuitive term (and never has been.) If anything the intuition seems completely tangential to it's actual meaning. But if you choose a FSF License, then you are releasing code under that license.

"Open Source" is a somewhat better name - but again open to misinterpretation. "Open" to whom? Everyone?

But for a -company- (and make no mistake, we're talking about -companies- altering the "popular meaning") to change the meaning so that it dilutes the actual meaning, and makes companies more powerful, I feel is not ok. In that context Open Source means something. Whatever they "intuit".

To answer one of your questions, yes, every shoe manufacturer *does* get to decide what "Ethically Sourced" means. "ethically sourced isn’t a coined label with a standard legal definition. There’s no official institution approving its use in consumer marketing. Because ethical sourcing isn’t a term from an institution with a specific set of standards, it can encompass a wide range of ethical considerations."

I mean, yes, I do think it's "on them", I do think it's reasonable to criticize the definers of jargon terms that confuse people due to mismatching with their plain reading of the terms...

I think your other examples are indeed examples of the same kind of issue. For instance, I would say that "organic" is a much worse offender due to it targeting a much larger audience than our computing jargon does. I don't know whether "ethically sourced" has a technical definition that is a good match for my intuition of what it means, but I wouldn't be shocked at all to discover that it does not.

But like I said, I'm sympathetic to the definers of these kinds of things. They want something that works as marketing, so they use plain words that people have positive associations with ("free", "open", "organic", "ethical"), but then those words are too vaguely defined for their purposes so they also attach further meaning to them. But then that results in this tension, where people naturally assume the words mean only what they mean, and some community of gatekeepers has to be vigilant to come in and set the record straight.

Notably, we don't do this sort of thing with medicines, for instance. There isn't a community of people who have to correct peoples' use of a descriptive plainly worded jargon term like "happy pills", they are instead referred to as SSRIs, which has no plain reading and thus no potential for confusion.

I agree that it isn't good for companies to take advantage of this plain reading / technical definition mismatch, but I also think it's inevitable when trying to have it both ways by using a plain-sounding term while attaching it to a technical definition.