The phrase 'open source' (still) matters
In 1988, “Resin Identification Codes” where introduced by the plastic industry. These look exactly like the recycling symbol ♺, which is not trademarked or regulated, except that a number is enclosed within the triangle. These symbols simply identify what kind of plastic was used. The vast majority of plastic is non-recyclable, but has one of these symbols on it to suggest otherwise. This is a deceptive business practice which exploits the consumer’s understanding of the recycling symbol to trick them into buying more plastic products.
The meaning of the term “open source” is broadly understood to be defined by the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition, the “OSD”. Under this model, open source has enjoyed a tremendous amount of success, such that virtually all software written today incorporates open source components.
The main advantage of open source, to which much of this success can be attributed, is that it is a product of many hands. In addition to the work of its original authors, open source projects generally accept code contributions from anyone who would offer them. They also enjoy numerous indirect benefits, through the large community of Linux distros which package and ship the software, or people who write docs or books or blog posts about it, or the many open source dependencies it is likely built on top of.
Under this model, the success of an open source project is not entirely attributable to its publisher, but to both the publisher and the community which exists around the software. The software does not belong to its publisher, but to its community. I mean this not only in a moral sense, but also in a legal sense: every contributor to an open source project retains their copyright and the project’s ownership is held collectively between its community of contributors.