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Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998.

Christine took some time to answer questions from Slashdot readers.
What exactly happened in 1998?
by Anonymous Coward

Prior to 1998, had you heard anyone using the phrase "open source" before? Or was it something you came up with on your own as the only logical set of words to describe source code which is openly shared.

Starting earlier, our non-profit, Foresight Institute, had been holding a series of small invitational meetings at our office in Los Altos, focused on our free software project and the field in general. One topic of discussion that came up now and then was the problem of the name free software and how it confused newcomers into thinking that the main point was the price because, sadly, in English our word for "free as in freedom" and "free as in price" are the same. (In Spanish they wisely use different words for these two concepts.) But nothing had yet been suggested that seemed good enough to catch on.

Sometime after that the term "open source software" popped into my mind, and my immediate thought was "that's good enough." Not ideal, not great, but good enough to solve the problem. I ran it by a few friends including Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, and they agreed it was probably good enough. One other friend, who worked in PR, thought that "open" had already been overused in the software field, which was true, but it seemed appropriate in this context so I decided to go ahead with the idea anyway.

Eric Raymond came to visit Silicon Valley in connection with the transition of the Netscape code from proprietary to publicly available, so we met again to discuss these new developments. While there Eric took a call from two people from Netscape, and when he was done I asked to speak to them, a man and a woman (possibly Mitchell Baker?). I mentioned the name problem and they agreed, but none of us then had a better term to suggest.

When Eric Raymond visited again, he needed to have other local meetings and doesn't drive, so I offered to drive him around. That's when I found myself sitting in on the meeting at VA Research that included Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and "maddog" by phone; I wasn't invited to it. Probably the others thought I was Eric's chauffeur or even his girlfriend. Prior to the meeting I had discussed the "open source software" idea with Todd Anderson, who was also at this meeting, but not with Eric himself, whom I didn't know as well at this point. Being a non-programmer, I had pretty much zero status at this meeting, except with the two who already knew me, so I didn't feel it would work to just say "Hey, here's why you guys all need to use my terminology for your field." The meeting was primarily on broader free software topics anyway, so I just listened and didn't see an opening. Fortunately, Todd was on the ball and tried an interesting tactic: he just used the term casually, not introducing it formally but just throwing it out there in another context. Of course then I perked up and started paying closer attention to see what would happen, if anything. A few minutes later someone else, who hadn't been informed in advance, spontaneously used it, again in a context unrelated to a change in terminology. Todd and I looked at each other and smiled: the meme had jumped successfully!

Later in the meeting, as a rather minor matter compared to the rest of it, the group had a brief discussion and agreed that open source software would be a useful term. No attention was paid then to who suggested it originally, which was fine with me. Later on, Eric even briefly thought it was he himself who came up with it (which would be quite a plausible thing for him to do), but Todd took the initiative to let him know that it was me, and immediately Eric was super gracious about correcting the record on that.

At the time, Todd told me that someday I would be glad to have credit for this, and he was quite right about that. So thank you Todd, wherever you are (and please get in touch).

I don't recall hearing the phrase before it popped into my head, though I found out later that it has long been widely used in the "intelligence" (i.e., spy) field to refer to publicly available information content, so the usage is similar enough to not be a problem. Since the recent coverage of the 20th anniversary, a couple of previous uses in a software context have turned up also. But since I was neither in software nor in intelligence, I probably did not see any of these uses.

I've seen a couple of commenters suggesting that I should defend a claim to having coined the term. Fortunately for me, I don't need to do this, because that decision is not based on my current input or comments. It's an open source community decision based on past experiences, and as a non-programmer I don't even get a vote on this. I just have to accept whatever the community decides, which is why I waited twenty years to let things settle out before publishing my own account.

For a more of the history, see my longer version at Opensource.com. (The OSI history page lists Michael Tiemann also at the VA Research meeting, which is probably correct though I don't recall it. It also has the meeting dated two days earlier than my notes indicate; sadly my calendar data from those days is not accessible format-wise anymore.)

What was it like in 1998?
by DevNull127

As someone who worked closely with Eric Raymond (and had interactions with Jon "maddog" Hall), what were they like in 1998? I'm curious what the whole "mood" of the development community was like in 1998 at that historic meeting. Maybe you could also talk about how things changed -- what they were like before the Open Source movement revved into high gear, and what they were like after.

And how does it all compare to when you first joined the tech scene in the 1980s?

CP: When I arrived in Silicon Valley in 1985, we were still in the early days of the personal computer. Most people did not have an email address or even a fax machine. Only visionaries like Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart were talking about hypertext and the future of online personal computing. At that time, working on Nelson's Xanadu Hypertext Project was one of the few ways available to move toward that future, and it was through that project that I met many very smart software people including Mark S. Miller and Dean Tribble (who have just started a new company, Agoric, to advance secure smart contracts). It was an exciting time in terms of knowing the potential, but frustrating because the underlying chips were still slow, with little memory or graphics functionality, and online communications were done over regular phone lines using modems, painfully slow.

I vividly recall when Martin Haeberli came to the Foresight office to show us an early MOSAIC browser. It wasn't super impressive at that time, but he explained that this was the start of what would become a world of online hypertext, and he was right. The early days of the World Wide Web were extremely exciting to those of us who had been inspired by Nelson's and Engelbart's visions of hypertext. FINALLY we got to make links! But also they had an undercurrent of intense frustration, because so many of the visionary features were missing, such as automatic micropayments to authors for their original publications and even their quotes used elsewhere online. But the term micropayment was seen by many as anathema, because "information should be free." Even back then, some of us knew that there was no such thing as a free lunch, and that expenses must be paid somehow. It's this lack of micropayments to content providers that has led to today's ubiquitous business model of selling users' personal information and manipulating them using highly-targeted ads, and the negative effects of that on society.

At the time, the open-sourcing of Netscape was seen as yet another innovative Silicon Valley company succumbing to unfair pressure by the all-powerful behemoth Microsoft. This sad situation had the silver lining of bringing an exciting browser project into the free software world. But the small startups trying to do support for free software were having a heck of a time explaining to customers why they should have to pay anything at all to use "free software". (And of course they don't, if they are good enough at dealing with code...which most people, including me, are not.) This awkwardness is what led to the addition of "open source software" to the original -- and still useful -- name "free software".

I did not get to know maddog, but in 1998 Eric Raymond was the one who was most active in doing public outreach, especially media, on behalf of open source. He worked very hard for months or years, unpaid to my knowledge, to promote these ideas and the community. There were many others of course, including Bruce Perens who with Eric co-founded Open Source Initiative to defend the ideas and approve licenses that met the new Open Source Criteria they wrote. Tim O'Reilly played a key role by convening and hosting the community in meetings to make group decisions. And of course we should remember Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, which had been and still are doing similar work under the original term.

To me as a relative outsider, it seemed that there was a big change when the new term was introduced, which happened very close in time to the Netscape open-sourcing. I had been reading Slashdot occasionally, mainly to admire the way it was designed and enabled users to interact much more effectively that other systems I'd seen. But when the new term arrived, it seemed that suddenly there was a fast ramp-up of attention and especially media coverage of the field. For a while it seemed like every day there was a new exciting development in "open source", which often appeared in quotes because it was so new. And these were appearing in non-programmer publications, ultimately in mainstream news media. Reading Slashdot became a daily necessity, especially for me, since I was getting some kind of thrilling brain chemistry surge every time I saw the term used. I still do, but it's smaller now: a nano surge.

Nanotech Prognosis / Open Source Utopia
by qaute

What's the current outlook for nanotechnology? Technically speaking, do we get Star Trek replicators soon, or is that still a 25+ year thing?

The ultimate dream in nanotechnology is a molecular assembler (atomic 3D printer) on every desktop, with a widespread community of hardware designers/developers analogous to open source software today. You'll be able to, say, download files to build a new car from GitHub. Hackaday has a good writeup. Suppose that someone finally figures out how to build such a molecular assembler. Chances are it'll be patent-encumbered and NDA'd. How can we [get] from here to there...? Politically, how do regulations, industry, and patents look?

Socially, is it generally viewed as positive or negative these days?

CP: Let's say that the goal is an open-source molecular 3D printer able to construct molecular machinery, plus a large library of open-source designs to use with the device. Let's divide this into the hardware components and software components.

It's taken decades and billions of dollars investment to get us where we are today in conventional hardware chips. That kind of investment has not been made yet in molecular machinery. I think eventually we would get there using human chemists, but it appears that instead there will be a shortcut. Progress in artificial intelligence is moving faster now, and I expect that instead of human chemists and human designers of molecular machinery and associated construction pathways, this work will be done faster via AI. We do not need AGI (artificial general intelligence) to do this. Targeted knowledge of chemistry and design engineering are what is needed, and that's coming sooner than AGI. So it could well be sooner than 25+ years depending on AI progress, but (and here's the catch) if that happens, the world will be changing in many other ways also, both positive and negative, to the extent that we may have other issues to deal with instead of having the opportunity of focusing on writing open source code for atomically-precise manufacturing.

Regarding regulations and patents: there's no particular regulatory focus on molecular machinery just now, and there probably won't be much until an actual problem crops up. As an example, consider the recent hearings on Facebook: the US legislators are not educated enough on those issues to grapple effectively with them. Patents seem likely to continue to be used whenever a company does the work, unless it sees a strategic advantage to open-sourcing the work.

I don't think that nanotech or atomically-precise manufacturing is on the public radar these days, either positive or negative. The nanotech term itself has become a marketing term for anything with at least one nanoscale dimension, so the average person who hears it probably thinks that we already have nanotech and therefore it's not a big deal. But it's not clear that we need or want the average person to be paying attention to atomically-precise manufacturing just now anyway, so maybe that's just as well.

Open source or free software
by Jim Hall

Some people prefer one term over the other. I'm curious: all these years later, do you still prefer the term open source software or are you more aligned to Free software?

CP: I use both terms, depending on context. When I'm with longtime hackers such as John Gilmore who naturally use the earlier term, I use it too. And of course if one is at a meeting of the Free Software Foundation, it's polite to use their preferred terminology.

However in dealing with non-software people or young people, I believe that the open source term is much clearer and therefore more useful. I tried doing a search on the two terms, and they are both in active use, but I found more "open source software" than "free software" usages. (This is a very crude measure and may be wrong, of course.)

Probably in Spanish-speaking countries, where they have the words gratis and libre to distinguish our two meanings for the English word free, there is less reason to use the new term. Someone could do a PhD dissertation comparing how the new term spread in the English-speaking world vs. the Spanish-speaking world. That would enable us to tease apart how much the newer term spread due to the free/free confusion problem vs. any more intrinsic value it may have, e.g., implying that the source code is open to public view.

Open source and medicine
by AmiMoJo

How can we get more open source medical software? Given that medical devices are so heavily regulated it seems like it will be hard to get, say, an open source pacemaker system that users can hack, or at least audit.

Radio software seems to be in a similar state - cellular modems, wifi chipsets etc. are all heavily regulated and closed source, with signed code required for updates.

CP: As far as I can tell, the Internet of Things world is still using the "security through obscurity" model. Given that, regulators are naturally going to favor closed source code, since that seems to be a way to reduce the likelihood of attacks.

If we want regulators to approve open source software for important devices, we need to show that it's as secure, or preferably more secure, than closed source code.

Although I am not a programmer, I have paid enough attention to this general issue to be intrigued with object capabilities (ocaps) as a path forward toward more secure code, whether closed and open source.

Currently the most serious effort I'm aware of in this area is Agoric.

There are (at least) two problems that ocaps does not solve. Social engineering will continue to be an issue, though my understanding is that ocaps reduces the damage that these can cause. Finally, there is the problem of compromised hardware: deliberate back doors designed into our computer chips; this is a huge problem with only very expensive solutions; see the hardware question below for more on this.

For more on security, see the paper Cyber, Nano, and AGI Risks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks, by myself, Mark S. Miller, and Allison Duettmann, from the proceedings of UCLA's First International Colloquium on Catastrophic and Existential Risk (2017).

Pollution
by lhowaf

Nano-materials, in general, seem to be becoming a significant source of hard-to-cleanup pollution. Do you see nano-tech heading in the same direction?

CP: The long-term goal of atomically-precise nanotech is the complete control of the structure of matter (to the extent we care about that structure). This would include extremely advanced abilities to clean up the natural environment. The question is what the pathway looks like to get there, and how clean can we make that pathway? This last question is a matter of what we decide to do. If society decides that preventing nanoscale pollution is a priority, then we'll do much better than if we don't try. It's at least possible to consider how to make this happen commercially, through traditional regulatory mechanisms. The more difficult challenge is military use, and use in regions which don't prioritize environmental values. No easy answers here. But the ultimate goal, at least, is a very clean environment, and it should be achievable eventually. It was this prospect that drew me into trying to advance this field in the first place.

How to deal with nanotech hype problem?
by Goldsmith

I am a nanotechnologist. I've done great academic research, worked for the government, managed a few grants, and started a few companies. It's very easy to hype the potential of nanotechnology. On the other hand, it's very hard to get attention put on results from serious commercial efforts. Granting agencies and our community are not good at supporting companies that do what we all tell each other needs to get done (i.e. NanoIntegris). We are great at supporting academic research groups that have a patina of commercial application (i.e. IBM).

As a field we've missed celebrating a number of major commercialization milestones. CNT and graphene electronics are available commercially! Who knew? For five years or so, you could find commercial graphene electronics in cell phone screens in Shenzhen. For the last two years, you could find commercial graphene biosensors at many big pharma companies. For the last year, you could buy CNT based high power RF electronics.

If we were interested in showing the real potential of the field, wouldn't the leaders want to show everyone that it IS working? We have actually met the NNI timeline for commercialization set in the 1990s. The goals we set out with 20 years ago seem to mean nothing to the hype machine we've created.

Simply put, how do we deal with the addiction to hype in nanotechnology, and focus a bit more on substantive accomplishment?

CP: I'm speaking here from a US perspective. This problem is not unique to nanotechnology, or even to technology in general. It's part of a general decline that has at least two sources, the decline in education standards and the decline of serious journalism, resulting in a hype culture with hype consumers who cannot tell the difference among exciting current technologies, valid engineering prospects, and complete nonsense.

It takes substantial science background to understand why nanotech and atomically-precise manufacturing are interesting, and few in our society today have that background. Our K-12 system is largely broken. Many of our colleges and universities now optimize for student entertainment and enjoyment, rather than the hard road of learning science and engineering.

Serious journalism has been decimated -- worse than decimated, including science and technology journalism. Consumers want all their information for free, and in many cases, you get what you pay for in this area as in others. Could micropayments help? Perhaps something built into the browser sending pennies or fraction of pennies to content originators? I am not sure. It seems worth a try. It could at least help with the privacy problem.

As for the education problem: we need to admit the disaster and try some major experiments. For example, some blame the decline of university standards on deceptively easy loans to students who don't realize what they are getting into. Glenn Reynolds has written books worth reading on this general problem of educational decline in the US, and I would look to him for ideas on solutions.

To me, compared to earlier decades, US society overall seems kind of decadent, cynical, in a cultural decline. I hope we can turn this around somehow. People like Slashdot readers give me hope. And there are still many, many people truly working to make the world a better place, including here in Silicon Valley. My view of Silicon Valley has a positive bias because I meet people through Foresight Institute, which helps select for good folks. I invite you all to join our email list (use blue button on this page) and come to our events. Some are research workshops (e.g., application form for Atomic Precision for Longevity workshop) and some are more accessible, such as our salons and Vision Weekend (videos). If you like what you see, consider donating; we are entirely supported by individual donations from great folks like the open source community.

Why Nanotechnology, for Laypeople
by qaute

Integrated circuits, solar panels, and GMOs are some pretty big results in nanotech these days. What are some future benefits we can look forward to that help justify further research to non-techies?

CP: My own focus is on the long term, very advanced applications such as molecular repair of the human body, ending disease and even aging itself. To me this is highly motivating! That's on top of the original goal of restoring the environment that drew me in originally.

Coming up with near- and intermediate-term applications is harder. This is why venture capitalists make lots of money, when they do their job well. Picking winning new applications is so challenging, especially in getting the timing right.

I can say this: amazing new catalysts and filtration technologies are on the way. Sound boring? It is totally not. Huge energy savings, cheap clean water for everyone (this would even help prevent wars), even blood filtration to take out all the stuff that should not be there.

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Nanotech threat landscape
by bjorng

How concerned should we be about nanotechnology equivalents of the software threats we see today? I would hate to have my circulatory system held hostage for bitcoin.

The Nanotechnology Corollary to Metsploit
by Anonymous Coward

The Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be a ramp-up to Micro-Electromechanical Machines (MEMs), which, in turn, will prime another ramp into atomic-scale nanotechnology. But already, security is atrocious. Worse than Windows XP's exploitation, endless automatic updates and a constant avalanche of zero-day patches.

What will a metasploit framework and CVE database for IoT, MEMs and smaller systems look like? How will biomedical bug bounties, vulnerabilities, exploits and weaponized payloads play themselves out?
________________________________________________________________________________

CP: We should be very concerned and more important, very vigilant. We need to solve today's Internet of Insecure Things as soon as possible, before even more of our world is controlled by software. As mentioned above, I am placing my hope in Agoric and object capabilities in general. There are also suggestions for how to address the insecure chip problem, though they are expensive and have performance costs as well; see the question from AmiMoJo below.

Recent improvements in physical security
by AmiMoJo

Recently big gains have been made in physical security. Many phones are encrypted by default and relatively difficult for unauthorized persons to unlock. Encrypted storage is increasingly common for computers too, although open source support for technologies like OPALv2 seems to be lagging behind closed source systems. In 2017 AMD introduced encrypted RAM.

All of these rely on special hardware to protect encryption keys and perform encryption functions at speeds fast enough to avoid any significant performance loss. It seems like hardware is necessary for very high levels of physical security anyway, e.g. tamper-proof boot ROMs.

How can open source provide this level of security when high end hardware is increasingly difficult for individuals to fabricate? Should we be thinking about how we can fabricate our own security processors and key storage, or is there another way to achieve high levels of physical security?

CP: My understanding from Mark S. Miller is that yes, we need to be thinking about fabricating our own chips, if we want to get around the problem of deliberately-installed backdoors.

In the paper cited above we write, "In the near term one can imagine a technology example that can be secure against those risks: a good open source processor design for which there is a proof of security comparable to the proof of security of the seL4 software. There are many open source processor designs that are sufficiently high performance that, when run on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), can run fast enough to be practical for many applications. By combining these well-designed processors with a layout algorithm that randomizes layout decisions, the processor could be randomly laid out for each individual hardware instance. Given this randomized layout, there is no feasible corruption of the FPGA hardware that can escape notice under electron microscopes and that would also be able to successfully corrupt most instances of the processor."

UPDATE: After writing the above, I met with Mark and he explained that another approach has been found to the problem of insecure chips. At the recent Zcon0 conference, a method was described using zkSnarks and/or Coda. It's not financially practical yet, and doesn't fix leakage of data, but addresses the integrity issue. This is way outside my area of expertise. Eventually, the Agoric website will have many relevant documents on these topics, but not yet.

50 years ahead
by EngineeringStudent

I heard a myth a few decades ago, that top-secret work in most fields is at least 50 years ahead of the current published state of the art. I can't begin to imagine what that would look like here. What sorts of things do you think are solidly plausible within the next 50 years of work in the field of nano-technology, and how would we detect them "in the field" today, if we were to look for them...?

I know there were published discussions about silicon based listening and transmitting devices, bugs, that were smaller than grains of salt. I also know that there was great published fervor over single-pixel cameras, and, in my personal opinion, I have seen a surprising gap in entangled non-return imaging. I expect "they" have working, single-photon, non-return-imaging cameras on grains of silicon too small for the eye to work with, so perhaps nano drone swarms used for data gathering/surveillance, where each drone is less than 0.1mm across?

When I look at robo-cat, and the alleged robo-squirrels or robo-insects, I think they have such swarms that can be ingested/injected/otherwise-implanted inside animals that don't realize they have become "listening posts". What would you do with a fully-functional jet-engine that was only a few microns across? I remember sub-cellular size bar-codes made by shooting proton based cylindrical holes in silicon, then lithographing layers of gold or other stuff to make the code, then removing the silicon substrate. Could we put markers into people to inform future medical reconstruction such as "non-invasive" 3d printing of organs in-vivo? How would we detect sub-cell-size tagging, or fabrication? I like the idea of nanotech-driven bio-energy harvesting. Why can't we turn trees into solar panels by hacking into their organic photosynthesis?

CP: These areas are above my pay grade, but for inspiration on what could be possible in 50 years I would look at high-quality hard science fiction. Some of those writers pay close attention to physical limits. Yes, the surveillance technology should be amazingly good (or bad, depending on one's point of view). I'm not sure we would need advance markers in the body in order to do great 3D printing of organs in vivo, but I could be wrong on that. Eventually I expect we will come up with physical barriers that only allow understood molecular structures to pass though, to avoid having to detect sub-cell size tagging inside our bodies, when it's harder to find. But that's very long-term and ambitious.

Is physical security a political problem?
by Anonymous Coward

How to defend against molecule-sized machines is a question, but there is a meta-question there: will we be subject to constant false flag attacks and entrapment? Year 2030: Great Leader or Deep State accuses you of carrying a nanotech attack. You and perhaps people of your supporting network get disappeared into high security facilities, solitary confinement and all. Can we disprove the authorities' lies? Will people be able to know... Will there be anyone left to speak for you?

CP: Yes, this is a meta question and not about nanotech per se. If government is so dysfunctional and corrupt that the scenario above can take place, we have already lost. Our goal has to be to prevent that level of corruption from taking hold. Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." To take a US perspective, there have been various times in our country's history when the smartest and most civic-minded people have turned their attention to political matters, to get them straightened out for their own generation and those to come. Jefferson wrote, "We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists." Sadly, it's looking like it's time to turn from being artists to being soldiers -- not physical soldiers, but soldiers in the fight for freedom, openness, and other values the open source community cares about.

Government Technology reports: On July 16, Google Maps is going to make it more difficult and expensive to use its API, which could make custom maps that rely on the service less sustainable or even unfeasible for the people who made them... First, Google Maps is requiring all projects to have an official API key in order to work. If a user doesn't have a key, the quality of the map will likely be reduced, or it could simply stop working. Second, API keys will only work if they are attached to somebody's credit card. Google will charge that card if users exceed a certain number of API requests, which is different for different services. Google will provide users a free $200 credit toward those costs each month...

There are a couple places where the changes might have more of an impact. One is in the civic hacking space, where people often work with government data to create niche projects that aim for low costs, or are free so that as many people as possible can use them... "I think that's what scares people a little bit, it certainly scares me, this thought of having this API out there and not knowing how many people are going to use it," said Derek Eder, founder of the civic tech company DataMade. "I don't want to suddenly get a bill for $1,000."
There's at least three Open Source alternatives, and Geoawesomeness.com lists nine more.

Slashdot reader Jiri_Komarek also points out that Google's move was good news for its competitor, MapTiler. "Since Google announced the pricing change the number of our users increased by 200%," said Petr Pridal, head of the MapTiler team. "We expect more people to come as they get their first bill from Google."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Linux computer manufacturer System76 made its mark in part because of its commitment to open source principles and doing what it believes is right. Last year it released its homegrown Linux, Pop!_OS. In early March, System76 founder Carl Richell tweeted about the company's plans to locate its computer manufacturing factory in Denver, Colorado. By moving its manufacturing from China to the United States, System76 is offering more proof that it's not afraid to buck prevailing tech norms to do things "the System76 way." Carl Richell, founder and CEO of System76, says in a Twitter exchange that they anticipate shipping products from the factory by the end of the year.

Slashdot reader silverdirk writes: Compiled languages have long provided access to the OpenGL API, and even most scripting languages have had OpenGL bindings for a decade or more. But, one significant language missing from the list is our old friend/nemesis Bash. But worry no longer! Now you can create your dazzling 3D visuals right from the comfort of your command line!
"You'll need a system with both Bash and OpenGL support to experience it firsthand," explains software engineer Michael Conrad, who created the first version 13 years ago as "the sixth in a series of 'Abuse of Technology' projects," after "having my technical sensibilities offended that someone had written a real-time video game in Perl.

"Back then, my primary language was C++, and I was studying OpenGL for video game purposes. I declared to my friends that the only thing worse would be if it had been 3D and written in Bash. Having said the idea out loud, it kept prodding me, and I eventually decided to give it a try to one-up the 'awfulness'..."

Today is the 20th anniversary of the phrase "open source software," which this article says was coined by the executive director of the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on nanotech and artificial intelligence. The phrase first entered the world on February 3rd, 1998, according to Christine Peterson: Of course, there are a number of accounts of the coining of the term, for example by Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman, yet this is mine, written on January 2, 2006. It has never been published, until today. The introduction of the term "open source software" was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users... Interest in free software was starting to grow outside the programming community, and it was increasingly clear that an opportunity was coming to change the world... [W]e discussed the need for a new term due to the confusion factor. The argument was as follows: those new to the term "free software" assume it is referring to the price. Oldtimers must then launch into an explanation, usually given as follows: "We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer." At this point, a discussion on software has turned into one about the price of an alcoholic beverage...

Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending -- in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me -- were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive -- a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic -- just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened...

Toward the end of the meeting, the question of terminology was brought up explicitly, probably by Todd or Eric. Maddog mentioned "freely distributable" as an earlier term, and "cooperatively developed" as a newer term. Eric listed "free software," "open source," and "sourceware" as the main options. Todd advocated the "open source" model, and Eric endorsed this... Eric Raymond was far better positioned to spread the new meme, and he did. Bruce Perens signed on to the effort immediately, helping set up Opensource.org and playing a key role in spreading the new term... By late February, both O'Reilly & Associates and Netscape had started to use the term. After this, there was a period during which the term was promoted by Eric Raymond to the media, by Tim O'Reilly to business, and by both to the programming community. It seemed to spread very quickly.
Peterson remembers that "These months were extremely exciting for open source," adding "Every week, it seemed, a new company announced plans to participate. Reading Slashdot became a necessity, even for those like me who were only peripherally involved. I strongly believe that the new term was helpful in enabling this rapid spread into business, which then enabled wider use by the public."

Wikipedia notes that Linus Torvalds endorsed the term the day after it was announced, that Phil Hughes backed it in Linux Journal, and that Richard Stallman "initially seemed to adopt the term, but later changed his mind."

An anonymous reader writes: "On December 1st, 24 Pull Requests will be opening its virtual doors once again, asking you to give the gift of a pull request to an open source project in need," writes UK-based software developer Andrew Nesbitt -- noting that last year the site registered more than 16,000 pull requests. "And they're not all by programmers. Often the contribution with the most impact might be an improvement to technical documentation, some tests, or even better -- guidance for other contributors."

This year they're even touting "24 Pull Requests hack events," happening around the world from Lexington, Kentucky to Torino, Italy. (Last year 80 people showed up for an event in London.) "You don't have to hack alone this Christmas!" suggests the site, also inviting local communities and geek meetups (as well as open source-loving companies) to host their own events.
Contributing to open source projects can also beef up your CV (for when you're applying for your next job), the site points out, and "Even small contributions can be really valuable to a project."

"You've been benefiting from the use of open source projects all year. Now is the time to say thanks to the maintainers of those projects, and a little birdy tells me that they love receiving pull requests!"

To celebrate Linux's 26th anniversary, the Linux Foundation tweeted a picture of Tux on a birthday cake, and linked to an essay on OpenSource.com by FreeDOS founder Jim Hall: My first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.03, with Linux kernel 0.99 alpha patch level 11. That required a whopping 2MB of RAM, or 4MB if you wanted to compile programs, and 8MB to run X windows... To celebrate, I reinstalled SLS 1.05 to remind myself what the Linux 1.0 kernel was like and to recognize how far Linux has come since the 1990s.
"Getting X windows to perform was not exactly easy..." Hall writes, adding "the concept of a desktop didn't exist yet." Meanwhile Phoronix celebrated by republishing that fateful email Linus Torvalds sent on August 25, 1991. And Fossbytes shared the most recent statistics about modern-day Linux's 20 million lines of code from the Linux Foundation: During the period between the 3.19 and 4.7 releases, the kernel community was merging changes at an average rate of 7.8 patches per hour; that is a slight increase from the 7.71 patches per hour seen in the previous version of this report, and a continuation of the longterm trend toward higher patch volumes.

An anonymous reader quotes OpenSource.com: A unique trait of open source is that it's never truly EOL (End of Life). The disc images mostly remain online, and their licenses don't expire, so going back and installing an old version of Linux in a virtual machine and getting a precise picture of what progress Linux has made over the years is relatively simple... Whether you're new to Linux, or whether you're such an old hand that most of these screenshots have been more biographical than historical, it's good to be able to look back at how one of the largest open source projects in the world has developed. More importantly, it's exciting to think of where Linux is headed and how we can all be a part of that, starting now, and for years to come.
The article looks at seven distros -- Slackware 1.01 (1993), Debian 0.91 (1994), Jurix/S.u.S.E. (1996), SUSE 5.1 (1998), Red Hat 6.0 (1999), Mandrake 8.0 (2001), and Fedora 1 (2003). Click through for some of the highlights.

• Slackware 1.01 (1993). "The best part about trying Slackware 1.01 is that there's a pre-made image in Qemu's 2014 series of free images, so you don't have to perform the install manually... In more ways than I'd expected, the system feels surprisingly modern. What's missing is any notion of package management. All installs and uninstalls are entirely manual, with no tracking."

• Debian 0.91 (1994). "To try Debian 0.91, I used the floppy disk images available on the Ibiblio digital archive... The install process is surprisingly smooth... The dpkg command exists, but it's an interactive menu-based system... Even so, you can sense the convenience factor in the design concept... I sincerely see why Debian made a splash."

• Jurix/S.u.S.E. (1996). "Because I wasn't specifically looking for the earliest instance, Jurix was the first Linux distribution I found that really 'felt' like it intended the user to use a GUI environment. XFree86 is installed by default, so if you didn't intend to use it, you had to opt out."

• SUSE 5.1 (1998). "I installed SUSE 5.1 from a InfoMagic CD-ROM purchased from a software store in Maryland in 1998. The install process was convoluted compared to those that came before... Included desktops were fvwm, fvwm2, and ctwm. I used fvwm, and it worked as expected. I even discovered tkDesk, a dock and file manager combo pack that is surprisingly similar to Ubuntu's Unity launcher bar."

• Red Hat 6.0 (1999). "The disc I used was purchased in June 1999. The installation was fully guided and remarkably fast... The desktop bundled with Red Hat 6 was, as it still is, GNOME, but the window manager was an early Enlightenment, which also provided the main sound daemon... Unlike later implementations of GNOME, this early version featured a panel at the bottom of the screen, with an application menu and launcher icons and virtual desktop control in a central location."

• Mandrake 8.0 (2001). "Mandrake 8.0 was released in 2001, so it would have been compared to, for instance, Apple OS 9.2 and Windows ME... I'd thought the Red Hat installation process had been nice, but Mandrake's was amazing. It was friendly, it gave the user a chance to test configurations before continuing, it was easy and fast, and it worked almost like magic..."

• Fedora 1 (2003). "The Fedora Core experience is largely indistinguishable from Red Hat 6 or 7. The GNOME desktop is polished, there are all the signature configuration helper applications, and the presentation is clean and professional... A red hat icon marks the applications menu, and the lower GNOME panel holds all the latest Linux application launchers, including the OpenOffice office suite and the Mozilla browser."

Jason Baker, a Red Hat data analyst, doesn't believe developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs. An anonymous reader quotes Baker's blog post: After reading the study one data scientist, Evelina Gabasova, performed some additional analysis and came to a slightly different conclusion, which feels a little more precise: "Environments where people use Git and contribute to open source are more associated both with higher salaries and spaces, rather than with tabs." In other words, if you're at a company where you're using version control and committing open source code upstream, you're statistically a little more likely to be a space-user and a higher wage-earner.
Even across all experience levels, contributing to open source still correlates to higher salaries, Gabasova concludes. "My theory is that when diverse people are working on open source projects together without enforced coding style, the possible formatting mess is nudging people towards using spaces simply because the code is consistent for everyone.

"This is just one of the possible theories, I didn't look to see if possibly language communities that use predominantly spaces (like Python or Ruby) are more active in open source."

He's been the White House technology advisor since 2015, and this month Alvand Salehi delivered a keynote address at OSCON about the U.S. government's commitment to open source software. An anonymous reader quotes OpenSource.com: The Federal Source Code Policy, released in August 2016, was the first U.S. government policy to support open source across the government... All new custom source code developed by or for the federal government must be available to all other federal agencies for sharing and reuse; and at least 20% of new government custom-developed code must be released to the public as open source. It also established Code.gov as a platform for access to government-developed open source code and a way for other developers to participate.

Before this policy was released, agencies were spending a lot of money to redevelop software already in use by other government agencies. This initiative is expected to save the government millions of dollars in wasteful and duplicative spending on software development. Because of this, Salehi said, open source is not a partisan issue, and "Code.gov is here to stay." Another benefit: Releasing open source code allows the government to benefit from the brainpower of developers across the country to improve their code.
Code.gov points potential contributors to their code repository on GitHub.

"The University System of Maryland has awarded 21 "mini grants" to university faculty to "help them expand open education resources," reports OpenSource.com. Recipients of the grants are also given time off to prepare courses that use open textbooks, and will receive personalized support and training on effective course design. An anonymous reader writes: "Although our faculty view textbooks as essential, some of our students see them as a luxury they cannot afford," said Community College of Baltimore County President Sandra Kurtinitis. "Having access to open educational resources will provide some financial relief for our students as well as contribute to their academic success." The cost of textbooks has risen 812% since 1978, the school system said in an announcement, "outpacing even the cost of medical services and new housing. Nationally, students spend an average of $1,200 a year on textbooks."

The Maryland Open Source Textbook initiative started in 2013 "to provide a state-wide opportunity for faculty to explore the promise of open education resources to reduce students' cost of attendance while maintaining, or perhaps even improving, learning outcomes." Since then it's helped replace traditional textbooks in over 60 different courses at 14 public institutions across the state, resulting in a cumulative cost savings of over $1 million for 3,500 students. "In addition to saving students money, faculty have gained the ability to adapt and customize their instructional materials to ensure they are aligned with their pedagogical methods to best meet their students' needs," the school system reports. "In follow up surveys with students participating in the MOST initiative, 93% reported that the open educational resource content they used was the same or better quality than traditional textbooks."

OpenSource.com reports on a Minnesota school's 1:1 program -- one device per child -- where "Lots of the Windows laptops were in very poor condition and needed to be replaced." An anonymous reader writes: An Indiegogo campaign triggered extra money and donations of laptops, allowing the school's Linux club to equip much of the school with Linux laptops. "When you're using open source software you're free to use operating systems and application software without the hassle of license keys or license tracking inherent with proprietary software," says Stu Keroff, the school's technology coordinator. "This allows a school to experiment [and] gives them the freedom to make mistakes...

But there's also another benefit. "By empowering the students to be part of that process we were able to get more done, and to generate more excitement about the learning that the students were taking part in." There's now a waiting list for the school's Linux club, where they'd planned to cap membership at 35...until 62 students applied. Instead, they found themselves creating two Linux clubs, one for the sixth graders, and one for the 7th and 8th graders.
And to answer the obvious question -- they're using Ubuntu, with the Unity desktop.

An anonymous reader writes: For many years, the open source software community has made the distinction between "free as in freedom" (the software can be used or modified as the user sees fit) and "free as in beer" (the software is available at no cost). Some have added a third type of free: "free as in puppy". Like a puppy, adopting open source software has ongoing cost. What many people don't consider is that developing open source software has a cost, too. Many developers purchase extra hardware for testing or pay for code hosting, a website, etc. A pending bill in the New York Senate aims to help offset those costs. The bill, sponsored by Senator Daniel Squadron (D-26th) and co-sponsored by Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson (D-36th), would provide a tax credit of 20% of "expenses associated with the development of open source and free software", up to an annual maximum of $200. Based on a 2006 report by the Center for American Progress, this bill appears to be the first of its kind introduced to a state legislature. I'd rather they require that any software developed at taxpayer expense be released as open source.

An anonymous reader writes: The growing trend of closed content silos -- publishing platforms that require a login in order to view the content is a step away from a more open web. Back in December of last year, Facebook launched its own in-app browser, which is basically a web-view that loads links you tap on using the Facebook app. Although in-app browsers may be convenient for some, such features are primarily designed to keep users inside of the application for a longer duration, which translates to more advertising exposure (and, thus, more money). This kind of feature can be challenging to the goal of keeping the web open, not only because the feature overrides the end user's default mobile browser, but also because it keeps users in a closed ecosystem (versus exploring the web). Additionally, the Instant Articles feature doubles down on siloed content by working with publishers to make articles available nearly instantly within the app, loading much faster than they would through a mobile browser. This sounds good, and it is convenient. But it also sets up a path for monetizing content that would otherwise be viewable outside of the closed silo, and, because you're using the app to browse the web inside this silo, there are privacy concerns. Unlike using a browser such as Firefox or Chrome, which has a private browsing option, a user of Facebook's in-app browser does not have the same privacy control. It's no secret that Facebook has been trying to create what appears to be a closed version of the internet. The social juggernaut's Free Basics initiative, for instance, offers users with free access to select websites. Facebook gets to be the gatekeeper of the platform. This is something that didn't sit well with some privacy advocates in India, who played an instrumental role in banning Facebook's initiative in the country. Facebook is not just a social networking website where people go to talk with their friends and family, Facebook has become a mammoth platform that offers the ability to upload videos (mimic YouTube), and send money to your friends (mimic PayPal) among other things. It is almost scary to see the rate at which Facebook is expanding and trying to absorb everything that comes in its way.

An anonymous reader writes: After over a decade of ownership of the product, Google announced just a few weeks ago that it will be closing the shutters for good on Picasa, a cross-platform photo viewer and organizer with basic editing capabilities. In the official announcement, Google has set March 15 as the end of support for the desktop client, with changes to the accompanying web-album hosting service set to roll out later in the spring. On Opensource.com, Jason Baker rounded up 9 open source and Linux-compatible alternatives to the popular photo sharing service.

An anonymous reader writes: At social media startup Buffer, a single leadership decision eliminated salary negotiation for new employees, preempted gender-based salary discrimination, and prompted a flood of job applications. The decision? Make all employee salaries transparent. "We set down transparency as a core value for the company," CEO Joel Gascoigne said in 2014. "And then, once we'd done that, we went through everything. And salaries was one of those key things that we found that [made us] question ourselves: 'Why are we not transparent about this?'" Years later, the policy is still in place (go ahead and calculate your salary as a would-be Buffer employee) — and it presents a fascinating case study for anyone interested in the ways open organizations approach a rather prickly subject: transparency.

Community manager Rikki Endsley writes: The open source label was created back in 1998, not long after I got my start in tech publishing. Fast forward to late 2014, when I was thinking about how much open source technologies, communities, and business models have changed since 1998. I realized that there was no easy way (like a yearbook) to thumb through tech history to get a feel for open source. Sure, you can flip through the virtual pages of a Google search and read the "Best of" lists collected by a variety of technical publications and writers, much like you can thumb through newspapers from the 1980s to see how big we wore our shoulder pads, neon clothing, and hair back then. But neither research method is particularly efficient, nor do they provide snapshots that show diversity within communities and moments of time. The idea behind the Open Source Yearbook is to collaborate with open source communities to collect a diverse range of stories from the year. We let the writers pick the criteria, which means the yearbook isn't just full of the fastest, most popular, smartest, or best looking open source solutions. Instead, the yearbook offers a mix of open source solutions and projects, from a range of writers and communities, to offer a well-rounded (albeit incomplete) glimpse at what open source communities and projects looked like in 2015. The yearbook is now available for a free download.

An anonymous reader writes: The original Raspberry Pi went on sale four years ago, and more than 8,000,000 units have shipped since then. Raspberry Pi computers are used in schools and universities, in factories and other industrial applications, in home automation and hobby projects, and much more. Today the Raspberry Pi 3 was announced, featuring a 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, making it roughly 10x the speed of the original Pi 1. Many people will be pleased to hear that the Raspberry Pi 3 also features on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, greatly improving the device's connectivity. The new device goes on sale today at the usual price of US $35. (Here's the official announcement itself.)

jones_supa writes: For four years, Garth Braithwaite has been working at Adobe on open source projects as a design and code contributor. In addition to his work at the company, he also speaks at conferences about the power of design, improving designer-developer collaboration, and the benefits of open source. Still, he argues that the user experience is weak in many open source projects. One of the largest contributing factors is the lack of professional designers contributing to open source projects. Secondary to that, there are open source project owners who are unaware of the value of design or are unsure where to start with the design process. In an interview to Opensource.com, Braithwaite talks about the UX/UI topic, and gives some honorable mentions of projects that get it right.

An anonymous reader writes: Several major tech and open source sites—including Opensource.com and Infoworld—have published lists of the top open source projects of the year. What's your pick for the biggest, best, or most important open source project of 2015? Are there any projects that made big leaps this year that aren't getting the recognition they deserve?

An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled the Pi Zero, a new $5 mini-computer, Thursday morning. The board is the smallest Raspberry Pi yet, containing the first-gen Raspberry Pi's BCM2835 chip (safely overclocked to 1GHz) and 512MB RAM. The latest issue of The Magpi will include a free Raspberry Pi Zero and hits U.K. newsstands Thursday. The announcement came just a few days before the highly anticipated C.H.I.P. $9 mini-computer goes on sale to the public. puddingebola writes: How can they achieve this price, you may ask? "Its 40-pin GPIO header has identical pinouts, although the pads on the circuit board are "unpopulated," meaning you'll have to solder on your own connector. The same goes for the composite video output: The connection is available, but if you need a socket, you must solder it yourself." Dude, go to Radio Shack. Some relevant specs besides those mentioned above, from the blog post linked:

• Micro-SD card slot
• mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
• Micro-USB sockets for data and power
• Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B
• An unpopulated composite video header
• "Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm"

New submitter graffitiwriter adds a note that the newest Pi has "already been turned into a retro gaming console. It turns out the Pi Zero is more than capable of running Retro Pie and other emulators, and even has a video output that lets you play games on an old CRT TV."

An anonymous reader writes: In an article titled "Scrum is dead: breaking down the new open development method," Ahmad Nassri writes: "Among the most 'oversold as a cure' methodologies introduced to business development teams today is Scrum, which is one of several agile approaches to software development and introduced as a way to streamline the process. Scrum has become something of an intractable method, complete with its own holy text, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development , and daily devotions (a.k.a., Scrum meetings). Although Scrum may have made more sense when it was being developed in the early '90s, much has changed over the years. Startups and businesses have work forces spread over many countries and time zones, making sharing offices more difficult for employees. As our workforce world evolves, our software development methods should evolve, too." What do you think? Is Scrum still a viable approach to software development, or is it time to make way for a different process?

An anonymous reader writes: Although I spend a considerable amount of my time at work using shell commands and other text-based applications, I've never really given much thought to what terminal emulator I use. A recent article over on Opensource.com rounded up their picks for their seven favorite terminals, but I'm still unsure if it really matters which one I pick. Do you have a favorite terminal emulator, and if so, what makes it your favorite? I'm interested in hearing about that "one killer feature" that really sold you on your choice.

digitalPhant0m writes: Six years ago today the Go language was released as an open source project. Since then, more than 780 contributors have made over 30,000 commits to the project's 22 repositories. The ecosystem continues to grow, with GitHub reporting more than 90,000 Go repositories. And, offline, we see new Go events and user groups pop up around the world with regularity And Opensource.com notes that Mozilla Firefox has just hit 11 years of age, too.

An anonymous reader writes: Automotive software issues such as the Jeep hack and Volkswagen cheating on emissions tests have made headlines this year, which means the public is thinking about software in cars like never before. Some experts have argued that mandating that such software be open source is a solution to the problem. In an article on Opensource.com, Ben Cotton writes that although there are definite benefits to public scrutiny of the software, code visibility alone is no guarantee. It's an important thing to bear in mind, because "Open, therefore secure" is an easy straw man to knock down.

Do you read OpenSource.com? If you're interested in Linux or Open Source, perhaps you should. Our interview guest today, Rikki Endsley, is an editor and community manager there. She says that while Red Hat is the site's sponsor, they never try to dictate the site's content. And even if you don't want to read another website (although OpenSource.com is a mighty good one), maybe you can make your way to the All Things Open conference October 19 and 20 in Raleigh.

Or you might want to submit an article proposal to OpenSource.com. They don't pay in money, but it's a prestigious site -- and we know professional writers whose work has appeared there, alongside articles written by people with strong programming skills but weak English skills -- who have been helped by Rikki and other site personnel to whip their thoughts into publishable form. All of this (aside from the All Things Open conference) goes on all year long, but Hey! If we're going to have a Most Open Month, it might as well be October, which is arguably one of the 12 most excellent months in the entire Gregorian calendar.

Do you read OpenSource.com? If you're interested in Linux or Open Source, perhaps you should. Our interview guest today, Rikki Endsley, is an editor and community manager there. She says that while Red Hat is the site's sponsor, they never try to dictate the site's content. And even if you don't want to read another website (although OpenSource.com is a mighty good one), maybe you can make your way to the All Things Open conference October 19 and 20 in Raleigh.

Or you might want to submit an article proposal to OpenSource.com. They don't pay in money, but it's a prestigious site -- and we know professional writers whose work has appeared there, alongside articles written by people with strong programming skills but weak English skills -- who have been helped by Rikki and other site personnel to whip their thoughts into publishable form. All of this (aside from the All Things Open conference) goes on all year long, but Hey! If we're going to have a Most Open Month, it might as well be October, which is arguably one of the 12 most excellent months in the entire Gregorian calendar.

An anonymous reader writes: While Grace Hopper's contributions to computing are remembered, celebrated, and built upon by her successors, COBOL itself is often dismissed as a relic of earlier era of computing. To a certain extent, that is true. Most of the COBOL being written today is for maintaining legacy code, not starting new projects. However, the language is still being updated, with COBOL 2014 being the most recent standard for the language, and there are still plenty of opportunities to apply for jobs that require COBOL experience. In an article on Opensource.com, Joshua Allen Holm highlights three open source projects that are keeping the language alive.

An anonymous reader writes: Italo Vignoli, founding member of The Document Foundation, reflects on the project's five-year mark in an article on Opensource.com: "LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity as community project leaders. At the time, forking the office suite was a brave -- and necessary -- decision, because the open source community did not expect OpenOffice.org to survive for long under Oracle stewardship." The project that was OpenOffice.org does still exist, in the form of Apache Open Office, but along with most Linux distros, I've switched completely to LibreOffice, after some initial misgivings.

An anonymous reader writes: There's been a huge push over the last few years to make programming part of the core academic curriculum. Hype or not, software developer Al Sweigart takes a shot at predicting what this will be in a future where some degree of coding skill is commonplace and he has an interesting take on it: "More programmers doesn't just mean more apps in app stores or clones of existing websites. Universal coding literacy doesn't increase the supply of web services so much as increase the sophistication in how web services are used. Programming—by which I mean being able to direct a computer to access data, organize it, and then make decisions based on it— will open up not only a popular ability to make more of online services, but also to demand more.

Almost every major website has an Application Program Interface (API), a formal specification for software to retrieve data and make requests similar to human-directed browsers. ... The vast majority of users don't use these APIs—or even know what an API is—because programming is something that they've left to the professionals. But when coding becomes universal, so will the expectation that websites become accessible to more than just browsers."

An anonymous reader writes: The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. To paint a picture of what computing was like back then, the Amiga 1000 was released, C++ was becoming a dominant language, Aldus PageMaker was announced, and networking was just starting to grow. Oh, and that year Careless Whisper by Wham! was a major hit. Things have changed a lot in 30 years. Back in 1985 the FSF was primarily focused on building free pieces of software that were primarily useful to nerdy computer people. These days we have software, services, social networks, and more to consider. In this in-depth interview, FSF executive director John Sullivan discusses the most prominent risks to software freedom today, Richard M. Stallman, and more.

An anonymous reader writes: At the beginning of August the Blender Institute released Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle, its seventh open project. More than just a 10-minute short film, Cosmos Laundromat is the Blender Institute's most ambitious project, a pilot for the first fully free and open animated feature film. In his article on Opensource.com animator and open source advocate Jason van Gumster highlights the film project and takes a look at some of its most significant contributions to the Blender open source project.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Croatian political party Sustainable Development of Croatia (ORaH) published a new policy that encourages the government to pursue open source solutions, addresses the dangers of vendor lock-in, and insists on open document standards. Best of all, they did it the open source way. In this article on Opensource.com, Croatian startup founder Josip Almasi highlights some of the policy's implications, as well as why it could matter in the upcoming election.

ectoman writes: The human genome specifies more than 500 "kinases," enzymes that spur protein synthesis. Four hundred of them are still mysteries to us, even though knowledge about them could spark serious medical innovations. But scientists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have initiated an open source effort to map them all—research they think could pioneer a new generation of drug discovery. As members of the Structural Genomics Consortium, the chemical biologists are spearheading a worldwide community project. "We need a community to build a map of what kinases do in biology," one said. "It has to be a community-generated map to get the richness and detail we need to be able to move some of these kinases into drug facilities. But we're just doing the source code. Until someone puts the source code out there and makes it available to everybody, people won't have anything to modify."

An anonymous reader writes: Patent trolling is not a new problem, although recently it seems that the issue has captured the attention of a broader audience. Four years ago, NPR produced an episode of This American Life called "When Patents Attack!" And, four months ago, John Oliver devoted the bulk of his time on Last Week Tonight to raising awareness about patent trolls. "Most of these companies don't produce anything—they just shake down anyone who does, so calling them trolls is a little misleading—at least trolls actually do something, they control bridge access for goats and ask fun riddles," he explained. " Patent trolls just threaten to sue the living s*** out of people, and believe me, those lawsuits add up." In an article on Opensource.com, Red Hat patent litigation defender David Perry takes a look back at the history of patent trolling, as well as some possible solutions to the problem.

An anonymous reader writes: Jono Bacon in his latest column writes about the story of LibreOffice and how it rose out of the ashes of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Bacon also touches on why he feels LibreOffice is such a key piece of Open Source for communities across the world. Jono says: "To look at LibreOffice today and compare it to Microsoft Office can be tempting. Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast, but when I think of the before and after vanity shots of the suite back in 1999 and today, what the community has accomplished is phenomenal. Developing LibreOffice has been hard, technically challenging, and at times demotivating work, and contributors' efforts can be seen by millions of users across the world."

An anonymous reader writes: The Government of India (GOI) has adopted a comprehensive and supportive open source policy that builds on earlier efforts to adopt open standards for procurement. As we've seen in other regions, the adoption of such policies often brings out concerns from some quarters who want to spread 'fear and doubt' about the policy. Red Hat Vice President of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs Mark Bohannon looks at the implications of the policy, as well as how it will fit into India's broader economic development strategy.

An anonymous reader writes: Today the Ada Initiative announced that the nonprofit will shut down in mid-October. Founded in 2011, the Ada Initiative is a nonprofit feminist organization created to help improve open source culture and build a more inviting, productive, safe environment for women. In this interview with Opensource.com, the co-founders look back at the organization's successes, and the work that still needs to be done.

An anonymous reader writes: At OSCON this year, Red Hat's Tom Callaway gave a talk entitled "This is Why You Fail: The Avoidable Mistakes Open Source Projects STILL Make." In 2009, Callaway was starting to work on the Chromium project—and to say it wasn't a pleasant experience was the biggest understatement Callaway made in his talk. Callaway said he likes challenges, but he felt buried by the project, and reached a point where he thought he should just quit his work. (Callaway said it's important to note that Chromium's code is not bad code; it's just a lot of code and a lot of code that Google didn't write.) This was making Callaway really frustrated, and people wanted to know what was upsetting him. Callaway wanted to be able to better explain his frustration, so he crafted this list which he called his "Points of Fail."

jrepin writes: The final draft version of the RGI (general interoperability framework), still awaiting final validation, maintains ODF as the recommended format for office documents within French administrations. This new version of the RGI provides substantiated criticism of the OOXML Microsoft format. April thanks the DISIC (French Inter-ministerial IT directorate) for not giving in to pressure and acting in the long-term interest of all French citizens and their administrations. As Wikpedia notes, OOXML (Office Open XML) is not to be confused with OpenOffice.org XML. (Also on the open-source office-document format front, OpenSource.com has taken a look at five open alternatives to Google Docs.)

Lemeowski writes: It's not often that you get to glimpse behind the curtain and see what led a proprietary software company to open source its software. Last year, the networking software company Midokura made a strategic decision to open source its network virtualization platform MidoNet, to address fragmentation in the networking industry. In this interview, Midokura CEO and CTO Dan Mihai Dumitriu explains the company's decision to give away fours years of engineering to the open source community, how it changed the way its engineers worked, and the lessons learned along the way. Among the challenges was helping engineers overcome the culture change of broadcasting their work to a broader community.

An anonymous reader writes: Monday saw the announcement of the Open Container Project in San Francisco. It is a Linux Foundation project that will hold the specification and basic run-time software for using software containers. The list of folks signing up to support the effort contains the usual suspects, and this too is a good thing: Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, the Linux Foundation, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat, and VMware. In this article Stephen R. Walli takes a look at what the project means for open source.

ectoman writes: Opensource.com has just published its annual Open Source Summer Reading List. This year's edition contains 15 recommendations for books that celebrate open source values and practices. Topics include Python programming, Grace Hopper, open-minded leadership, and teaching children to code. There are also books on the philosophy of open information, an intro to DIY/Maker activities, and even a book about mastering Emacs. What would you add to this list?

An anonymous reader writes: It's a trend that seems to permeate education across every discipline, from creative to technical: reliance on a single expensive, proprietary, vendor-driven tool. Whether it's the predominance of Adobe in design programs, of Visual Studio in many computer science programs, or even Microsoft Office components in business schools, too often students come away with education that teaches them how to be rote users of a tool rather than critical thinkers who can apply skills in their discipline across toolsets. Relying on knowledge of a single tool chain can create single point of failure for a student's education when licensing comes back to bite. What can we do to bring more software choice into education to give students more opportunity when they get out into the real world?

ectoman writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just published The Open Organization, a book that chronicles his tenure as leader of the world's largest open source company. The book aims to show other business leaders how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness can enhance their organizations. It's also filled with information about daily life inside Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008 after leaving Delta Airlines, and he says his time working in open source has changed him. "I thought I knew what it took to manage people and get work done," he writes in The Open Organization. "But the techniques I had learned, the traditional beliefs I held for management and how people are taught to run companies and lead organizations, were to be challenged when I entered the world of Red Hat and open source." All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Opensource.com is hosting free book club materials.

ectoman writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just published The Open Organization, a book that chronicles his tenure as leader of the world's largest open source company. The book aims to show other business leaders how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness can enhance their organizations. It's also filled with information about daily life inside Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008 after leaving Delta Airlines, and he says his time working in open source has changed him. "I thought I knew what it took to manage people and get work done," he writes in The Open Organization. "But the techniques I had learned, the traditional beliefs I held for management and how people are taught to run companies and lead organizations, were to be challenged when I entered the world of Red Hat and open source." All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Opensource.com is hosting free book club materials.

An anonymous reader writes with news about the efforts of the The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to help in the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal. The team asks those living in the affected areas to help out by reporting which buildings are damaged, which are still standing, and where fissures and other quake damage is located. Opensource.com has a profile of their efforts which reads: Since the devastating earthquake in Nepal, there have been responses from all over the world from relief agencies, governments, non-profits, and ordinary citizens. One interesting effort has been from the crowdsourced mapping community, especially on OpenStreetMap.org, a free and open web map of the world that anyone can edit (think the Wikipedia of maps.) The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), an NGO that works to train, coordinate, and organize mapping on OpenStreetMap for humanitarian, disaster response, and economic development, has mobilized volunteers from around the world to help map since the Haiti earthquake in 2010.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to Rich Bowen's insightful, detail laden piece at Opensource.com about improving documentation: Have you noticed that the more frequently a particular open source community tells you to RTFM, the worse the FM is likely to be? I've been contemplating this for years, and have concluded that this is because patience and empathy are the basis of good documentation, much as they are the basis for being a decent person. What's the best example you know of for open-source documentation? How about the worst?

An anonymous reader sends this report from opensource.com: GNU/Linux distributions provide great advantages over proprietary alternatives for people with disabilities. All the accessibility tools included in Linux are open source, meaning their code is readily available if you want to examine or improve it, and cost nothing. Hardware devices, of course, are still going to cost money. Additionally, accessibility software on other platforms generally contain licensing constraints on the user. ... When it comes to accessibility, Linux is not without issues. ... The number of developers who specifically work on accessibility tools is quite small. For example, there is only one Orca developer, two AT-SPI developers, and a single GTK developer. ... Developers who do not depend on assistive technologies tend to forget—or don't know—that a disabled person might want to use their application, read their web page, and so on. ... The problem is not necessarily that developers do not care. Rather, it's is that accessibility is highly specialized and requires someone with knowledge in the area, regardless of platform.

An anonymous reader writes: Open bank data will give us the freedom to access all banks in real time and from a single view, automatically calculating the best deals in complete transparency, which will be a significant step forward for social good and give people more control over their finances. Meanwhile, financial tech incubators, accelerators, and startups are creating a more experienced talent pool of developers ready to act upon these newly available assets. From the article: "The United Kingdom government has commissioned a study of the feasibility of UK banks giving customers the ability to share their transactional data with third parties via an open standard API. First mentioned alongside the autumn statement back in December, the chancellor has now outlined plans for a mandatory open banking API standard during the recent budget in March."