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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."
The Open Source Initiative, founded by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond was founded in 1998, 12 years ago as of 2010. This is what the article refers to.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I've been hacking since 1974, and the concept and practice of open source was not new when I started. (I don't think we had a name for it, way back then. But I also think the tag "open source" is somewhat older than 15 years.)
Halloween was 1994 wasn't it? I mean, even if you only take into account attempts to monetize Linux the OSS movement started to become popularized at least 16 years ago. RMS wrote the Gnu manifesto 25 years ago, one could argue it all started then....
12 years ago, seven people in a room coined the term "open source", in an attempt to rebrand the much older "Free Software" movement, and launched what initially seemed like a quixotic exercise, to convince corporate drones who can't look past the CYA service contract, without having to admit that good work can be done by people without a profit incentive, and the whole world is not beholden to their stock market god.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The article too says just that.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
So what the hell was I using in 1996? Before Bruce and Eric started "promoting" themse... I mean, open source, other people like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds were actually writing it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
RTFA!
Seriously, is it that important to get an early post in that no one who read even the first sentence of the article would write?
The Open Source Initiative, founded by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond was founded in 1998, 12 years ago as of 2010. This is what the article refers to.
They may have coined the term, registered the domain, and made it all official...
But I was using open source software before 1998. And referring to it as "open source", too.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
First, I wish there were more people in organizing, coordination, mediating disputes. Like any human activity, too much time is wasted due to disputes and/or insuficcient coordination. Projects are abandoned, good people get frustrated, tired, upset, split, and end up duplicating efforts. I don't know of any group coordinating growth strategies, recommending methods to talk to new enthusiasts, how to *better* explain the ideas to new people, how to help people with common questions effectively, not just supplying a convincing answer, but actually resolving, or if not possible, taking note of the issues, and where to take them for proper addressing.
Second, I wish there were more encouraging, funding, advocacy, promoting and educating strategies. Funding, especially, seems to suffer from old models. The Humble Indie Bundle strategy, Summer of Code, and bounties seem like innovative ideas that are working.
For example, the main competition for open-source actually seems to be pirate-ware. People always consider open-source when faced with actually paying for software. What strategy should open-source take with this? None? Open standards, as well as standards in general, seem to greatly help open source. How can projects better incorporate them? I guess I'm saying more studies of strategies, and recommended guidelines for developers and users, seem like they could help a great deal.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
12 years later, and people are still confused between what Free Software, Open Source and FLOSS means. The movement seems to have had added more confusion than what they tried to solve. I wouldn't really call that much of a success. Also, the OSI haven't really done much more than set up some definitions and approve some licenses. While that in itself can be quite valuable, they seem to get a lot of credit for things they had absolutely no part of.
Windows is still used on desktops and laptops but look around you and everything runs ^nix
The thing that OSS contributed, though, was that the ^nix that was being run on all these things was freely distributed and pulling in the best ideas from every person or organization willing to contribute, rather than some devices running AIX with all the stuff IBM's engineers had thought of, while some other devices were running Solaris with all the stuff Sun's engineers had thought of, while still others were running SCO Unix with all the stuff old-school SCO had thought of, etc.
I am officially gone from
> RMS wrote the Gnu manifesto 25 years ago, one could argue it all started then
no. before GNU, there was "open source" code ;-) From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bsd
"first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD), which was released on March 9, 1978"
I'm sure there was open source code before that too..
Stallman started gcc 20+ years ago. Witout that and his GPL, this "movement" wouldn't exist.
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
You know, the one about the Data General ad in response to the press release how IBM "legitimizes the minicomputer", that said "The bastards say welcome..."
I give Perens & Raymond a lot of credit for 'legitimizing' the term, but certainly the concepts and the execution had been going on MUCH longer than "the last 12 years."
A lot of government contracts in the '70s and early '80s (and probably before that) came with source code and you could grab lots of it over Arpanet/early Internet if you had access. What I think Richard Stallman did was promote the -economic philosophy- that you should (a) always get source code ("free beer"); (b) have the right to modify that source code and redistribute the results ("free speech").
So we need to keep a couple of things straight:
1. 'access to source'
2. 'free (as in beer) software'
3. 'free (as in speech) modification and redistribution of software'
4. 'community development/maintenance'
These are usually combined into the term "open source", but they are 4 distinct aspects of that term.
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 #!
See, watch:
1) I, for one, welcome our Open Source dupe overlords, but do they run Linux?
2) ???
3) Natalie profits, naked and petrified and covered in hot grits.
"I've been hacking since 1974, and the concept and practice of open source was not new when I started."
This.
SHARE (www.share.org) was formed in 1955. It's goals were to share information among IT professionals. At least one of the subgroups, VMSHARE, had been sharing code (on tape) since 1973.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
On page 4 of Kenneth H. Rosen, Richard R. Rosinski, James M. Farber, and Douglas A. Host, UNIX System V Release 4: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, the subsection titled "Open Source Code" has the following first two sentences:
"The source code for the UNIX System, and not just the executable code, has been made available to users and programmers. Because of this, many people have been able to adapt the UNIX System in different ways. This openness has led to the introduction of a wide range of new features and versions customized to meet special needs."
The book by Rosen et al. cited above is has year of copyright 1996. There is apparently an earlier edition from 1990. This is no ordinary book by obscure authors--it was considered as one of the "bibles" for its subject at its time and would have been familiar to many. Already in the above description there are the crucial concepts of the importance of source code availability and adaptability.
Today, open source is mainstream, with original believers such as Red Hat worth billions and superpowers such as Oracle buying in.
Can we please chill with the rhetoric? Oracle is not a superpower, for fuck's sake. Secondly, Oracle's relationship with open source is not entirely clear. Oracle currently seems to be at odds with at least some open source initiatives. So I wouldn't be saying that Oracle is "buying in" if I were in your place.
Free Software licenses and Open Source licenses are the same licenses to this day. RMS has always accepted BSD as a free software license. There are some licenses that are not GPL-compatible but still considered to be Free.
Bruce Perens.
GPL v1 goes back to 1989, so free as in Libre clearly existed way before the "open source" branding. Of course in actuallity RMS was pushing free as in Libre *way* before GPL v1