What Leftwood was saying finally sank in ... groups like Seed Savers Exchange blur together the two meanings because they do go together in a practical way.
It is practical to maintain genetically stable OP varieties true to themselves with wind and insect pollination AS LONG AS you maintain isolation distances.
The only practical way to produce F1 hybrids is through human intervention (pulling off anthers or stamens, bagging blooms, transferring pollen with a paintbrush, creating 'pollen sterility' in one parent strain, or whatever.)
I'm revising my blog entry (like so, for now), but can 't find any "Idea" where I started to submit it as a Glossary tip. Maybe I forgot!
An OP variety is genetically stable enough that it "comes true" to it's parents if it pollinates itself.
So you can maintain an OP variety with random pollination in an open field (wind or insect pollination) as long as other varieties of the same species are not closs enough to cross-pollinate ("isolation distnace").
The opposite of an OP variety is an F1 hybrid variety. Those require human intervention to maintain. Usually there are two or more inbred "parent" varieties and the named F1 cultivar is produced by carefully preventing the seed parent from pollinating herself, while someone transfers pollen from the male parent.
Of course you CAN bag and hand-pollinate an OP variety (but there is no point to wasting the effort unless you CAN'T provide isolation distances and want to guarantee 0.0% cross pollimastion for some reason).
And F1 varieties CAN pollinate themsleves randomly without human intervention (but you get a wide variety of 'blah' plants without the special traits the F1 cultivar was appreciated for).
