Slashdot Mirror
A Decade of OSS, 10 Years After the Summit
Jacob's ladder writes "Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit and founder of Electric Cloud was there, and notes how much the landscape has changed. 'When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world. By the time of the first O'Reilly conference, there were dozens; now there are probably thousands. Also, open-source software has received substantial mainstream acceptance. 10 years ago, people were suspicious or afraid of it; now it is widely embraced.'"
Even without the acceptance of Linux on the desktop, there's no doubt that open source has been a ridiculously huge success since then. Equal acceptance (at least) as a server OS, it runs the majority of web servers and web scripting languages. Overall, a very successful life so far. I'm excited to see where it ends up ten years from now.
So, now that OSI is not an idea, but a group, and that everyone is happily coding... Are the people in the group going to come together? Someone, somewhere has said "United we stand, divided we fall" .. That goes for any association. I feel this future has potential if OSI can develop into a united power without losing the original sight (GPL2 vs. GPL3, anyone?)
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
I'm a huge fan of OSS, but what I love even more are the spin-off movements, namely the open content projects. Of those, the two I love most are Wikipedia (of course) and the just ramping-up Metagovernment project. Together, these are in the process of completely transforming how human society operates.
The most expensive OS ever developed by the largest OS maker in history was produced just to allow Microsoft to buy an overall mediocre online company? Vista's not doing as badly as it could, but it will cost the company millions in revenue at least, and the loss of brand prestige will do millions if not billions of dollars of damage if vista's widely considered a failure. I'm going to guess that your guess is wrong.
The open source movement was already well under way before the Open Source summit. It was already well on its way before the GNU manifesto and the founding of the FSF. There's a perception that it's big events like these that "created" the open source movement. That's not so, it's the open source movement that's created the possibility of big exciting events.
Even people talking about f/l/oss before these events seem to miss it. for example, Ousterhout's comment "When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world."
The Software Tools applications and libraries date back to the '70s. So does Emacs. So do the enormous collection of software published in Dr Dobbs' journal. So do the DECUS and other user group tapes. Much of this was game software, but it also included free compilers and interpreters (Forth, Small C, Tiny C, Tiny Basic, Tiny Pascal), editors (including emacs), operating system monitors (and early attempts at UNIX workalikes), and networks. Usenet was an open source project, and there were soon open source gateways between Usenet and networks like Fidonet... and one of the earliest Usenet groups was "net.sources".
I would say the first open source decade was the '70s, though in a way it's as old as the computer industry: "in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years" -- Richard Stallman. It's been argued that it wasn't really until the '70s that closed source really got under way, so one might say that it was the creation of a binary, non-shared, closed-source software industry that created what became the open-source movement (under whatever name you like).
So depending on whether you include the '60s, we're coming up on the end of the 4th or 5th "open source decade", the '00s. Not the first.
The primary driver for free software was the post office. DECUS tapes, Dr Dobbs' Journal, Software Tools, all the user group floppy collections. Then the primary driver for free software became the phone company. Usenet, Fidonet, BBSes. The Internet didn't get into the game, really, until the '90s... free/open/watchamacallit software was decades old by then. :)
Who turns on signatures?
The development I had hoped to see in Open Source but never did:
Exploit the fact that Open Source projects (potentially) have a lot more ears then closed source.
Does anybody remember back when computer magazines used to print programs in source code form for you to type in? That was certainly one way of making the code available.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Free Software was the first campaign to clearly associate rights with source code. Publicly distributed source code existed even before then, and sometimes had rights that complied with the OSD. The OSD was written to fit existing licenses, primarily BSD, GPL, and Artistic. Although Richard had published an article about the four freedoms in GNUs Bulletin number 4, he didn't maintain any publication about them after that, online or elsewhere, until after the OSD existed. The references to "open source" before 1998 don't clearly associate any rights with the fact that source code is distributed.
So, what I am claiming credit for is getting "Open Source" to be one thing that very many people ask for. It is essentially the same thing that Richard was (and is) promoting, but he was unable to reach the masses nearly as well, simply because of his emphasis that the audience must place its a priori appreciation of freedom above all else. I agee with Richard, but it wasn't the best way to convert the unconverted - at least those who didn't think very similarly to Richard.
Bruce Perens.