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Open Source After 12 Years
GMGruman writes "12 years ago, seven people in a room coined the term "open source" and launched what initially seemed like a quixotic exercise. Today, open source is mainstream, with original believers such as Red Hat worth billions and superpowers such as Oracle buying in. But open source has changed along the way, says InfoWorld's Peter Wayner, and may change more in coming years."
Try more than 15 years since the movement began. When the history ain't right I don't bother to RTFA.
Free Software.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
You were using free software. According to Richard Stallman, the difference is philosophical, although in practice they achieve the same results: the production of more free software.
Circumcision is child abuse.
12 years ago, seven people in a room coined the term "open source", in an attempt to rebrand the much older "Free Software" movement
Huh?
To say the "open source" movement was an attempt to rebrand "free software" is to completely misunderstand history. The movement to create the OSS brand name was all about broadening the tent to include licenses and models beyond the narrow vision held by RMS.
See, prior to OSS, "Free Software" meant the GPL. That's it, that's all. As such, anything under that banner was, quite understandably, considered dangerous by commercial companies building closed-source applications (cue flamewar about the viral nature of the GPL).
OSS was an attempt to broaden that view, including the BSD and MIT licenses, among many others, and to open people's eyes to more than just the GPL orthodoxy. And it worked. We now have a wide variety of licenses to choose from... the aforementioned BSD and MIT licenses, the Perl license, ASF, MPL, CDDL, etc, etc, not to mention the good ol' GPL. All of these fall under the OSS banner, but only one of them is "Free Software" (tm).
The term "open source" may have be deliberated crafted to appeal to the masses, but it is also undeliberately crafted in a flawed way, so that it could be interpred on two ways, and one of them is damaging to FOSS.
By the way, if you want to know what the damaging interpretation is, you just have to ask Microsoft.
Rethinking email
RMS ignited the modern revolutionary era of free software with his extraordinary legal invention, the GPL - but anyone informed in this area knows that the idea of freely sharing source code, for many of the same benefits underlined in the GPL and open source licenses, dates back at least to the 1950s and IBM SHARE.
you had me at #!
TFA does not support the summary. The submitter does not understand the history involved. Christine Peterson is one of at least three people including Bruce Perens who claim to have invented the term "Open Source", in spite of the simple fact that the term appears in the media and in press releases prior to that date. They did not invent the term; they co-opted it. TFA does not state that the term was "coined" at this meeting, although it does strongly imply it. This would be a false and revisionist view of history, but you can't saddle TFA's author with explicitly expressing it, only with failing to disambiguate. This may have been a deliberate choice on their part, since the actual origins of the term are themselves ambiguous.
Further, TFA makes no predictions, and thus can be roundfiled after being stamped "I've had all these thoughts before and they weren't particularly insightful."
GMGruman is either an ignoramus who speaks without knowing, or a follower of the OSI.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't have documents that old, but back in the day Stallman was pushing the GPL because GPLed software stayed free, not because it was the only free software. Since then, the FSF has published, on its website, some of Stallman's writings on the point.
Stallman has defined what Free Software is (it's his term, I guess he gets to define it), and provided a list of Free Software licenses (along, of course, with notes on which are copyleft licenses and which compatible with the GPL). You can go look it up.
Stallman's view on the terms is that he was explicitly fostering a social movement for Free Software (one of his oddities is that he considers non-Free Software to be immoral), and believes the Open Source movement to be fostering a technical movement, which is much less threatening to business but doesn't serve his ends nearly as well.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
> See, prior to OSS, "Free Software" meant the GPL. That's it, that's all.
> As such, anything under that banner was, quite understandably, considered
> dangerous by commercial companies building closed-source applications (cue
> flamewar about the viral nature of the GPL).
Certainly the FSF's GNU project didn't see it that way, they list a big whopping list of non-copyleft licenses as being free software.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
(This isn't revisionism either, they endorsed the non-copyleft X as being a future part of the GNU system way back in the 1980s for example)
Copyleft is a tool to promote freedom, but not a necessity, non-copyleft licensed software that meets the four freedoms criteria remains free software as long it it is passed around under such terms -- its only when someone co-opts such software, disregards the golden rule, and doesn't pass on the same freedoms to subsequent users that non-copyleft programs become non-free.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html
"""In the GNU Project we usually recommend people use copyleft licenses like GNU GPL, rather than permissive non-copyleft free software licenses. We don't argue harshly against the non-copyleft licenses--in fact, we occasionally recommend them in special circumstances"""
Perhaps what you mean is that there was a widespread misconception where free software and copyleft were conflated and that the term open source eliminated this.
But as a matter of technicality, there have been very few licenses interpreted to not meet the FSF's free software guidelines (as evidenced by the big horking list) that have met OSI's open source criteria, and I'm not even aware any on the reverse...
Thanks,
A proud, self-identified, *free software* user of a system running mixed copyleft and non-copyleft *free software*