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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.'"
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 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.
When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s ..., there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world.
You've missed a lot of computing history. Maybe the capitalized phrase "Open Source" was new, but the practice wasn't. For instance, before the mini/micro-computer "revolution", I worked on a number of IBM mainframes, all of which used VM as their main OS. VM originated in academia, and its source was always available to anyone interested. Of course, not too many people wanted it unless they had an IBM mainframe. Most such installations had a VM guru on the staff, and the VM gurus I knew were quite open with their source.
Around the same time, on one such machines, the engineering staff brought in Amdahl's unix system, which ran on VM of course. When we asked about source, the reply was "That's not an option; you get it whether you want it or not." "Open Source" may not have been a catch phrase yet, but Amdahl was happy to have customers with employees who could read the source, since that made their support job a lot easier. In fact, I sent them a kernel bug fix about a month after we got the system installed; I got back a nice "Thanks!" letter and was added to their published list of code contributors.
A more accurate history would be that open source was quite common before the mid-1980s, but it didn't need a name. Software vendors routinely gave source to customers who wanted it, with the expectation that customers would find and fix bugs and maybe add new features. One of Microsoft's innovations was to hold their source as proprietary, so as not to allow customers to improve the software. A lot of people were amazed that customers actually accepted this. You heard a lot of questions like "Would they buy a truck or car that couldn't be worked on by any mechanics except the manufacturer's?" But then, when it became clear that Microsoft had gotten away with such a dodgy scheme, it was quickly adopted by others, so that customers would have to pay them for patching up the bugs.
It still sorta amazes me that customers can be so dense as to pay money for products that can't be repaired by anyone but the manufacturer (and usually now not even by them). So much for the economists' idea of a rational marketplace.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
No, I don't think the picture is like you paint it.
I don't work for free. I prefer to write code that is released under the GPL, but not for free. Someone pays me to write such software because they have a use for it. In the past, too much of the code I've written for employers ends up rotting. They change systems, and bury or destroy old stuff for a variety of reasons that are mostly antisocial. It can be good to make a fresh start, but that's not what concerns them. They worry that competitors or lawsuit minded customers could do something with any such info. They are dismissive of reasons why it would be to their benefit to not lock up or destroy old software.
Avoid reinventing the wheel? That's the broken window fallacy. We don't like that when businesses try to pull that crap on us. A good example of that is being pushed to buy our music collections all over again to get them in a new format, as happened in the move from vinyl to CD, but which shouldn't be necessary to go from CD to mp3 or even worse from mp3 on old computer to same mp3 on new computer. Except possibly some tit for tat retaliation, most of us are not going to be hypocrites and try to pull that on businesses! We will show them a good example by not being antisocial. Yes, there can be some short term gain to sharp dealing, but long term, it's foolish. Just look at Microsoft. Yes, I know they've been very successful, but where are they going? You should not fear that we'll run out of work to do either.
Don't own our own work? Darn right! But no one else owns or can own it either. Unlike some businesses, we relinquish control and require they do so too, so that all our customers need not fear that someone will make abusive but legal (maybe) use of copyright to deny them use of software they have purchased. Otherwise a rival may be able to hurt them by acquiring the rights in some fashion, either by forcing them or us to sell the "ownership" of the software, or by buying us. Or fear that there will be no choice but to start over if the main programmer is "hit by a bus".
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Still, saying Linux (and FOSS in general) isn't a huge success because it hasn't taken over the desktop is kindof like saying ants are an ineffective species because few people keep them as pets.