Openwash

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To market something as open (without proprietary licensing) when it does not meet all the criteria of openness.

    "Over all, one cannot reduce the skills needed for collaboration to skills in joint publishing. On the other hand, the collaborative skills needed should still be knowledge skills, so the aim is to not 'openwash' the knowledge processes."

Example

More examples

"Over all, one cannot reduce the skills needed for collaboration to skills in joint publishing. On the other hand, the collaborative skills needed should still be knowledge skills, so the aim is to not 'openwash' the knowledge processes."

Etymology

Blend of open + greenwash.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.