Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Open Source After 12 Years

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the seems-like-only-yesterday dept.

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."

15 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Re:12 years? by RedK · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Re:12 years? by cstacy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.)

  3. Re:12 years? by Oriumpor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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....

  4. Allow me... by TheCarp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"
    1. Re:Allow me... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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).

    2. Re:Allow me... by david_thornley · · Score: 4, Informative

      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
  5. Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came by spun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came by Mongoose+Disciple · · Score: 5, Insightful

      First paragraph of TFA:

      It is now just over 12 years since seven people sat down in a conference room in Silicon Valley to fix what they saw as the marketing problem with the words "free software." Most people thought that the word "free" meant only that no one had to pay. It seemed they didn't have an attention span long enough to try to grok what Richard Stallman was saying when he kept repeating, "'free,' as in speech."

      So basically, this story is more about a revolution in branding than a revolution in software.

    2. Re:Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came by amorsen · · Score: 4, Informative

      Free Software.

      --
      Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
    3. Re:Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came by Stormwatch · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    4. Re:Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.'"
  6. Re:12 years ? by Mongoose+Disciple · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  7. Free sharing far pre-dates RMS by toby · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 #!
  8. Oracle is not a superpower by aeoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  9. You're kidding by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.