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."

Comments

Re:12 years?

[RedK]

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.

Allow me...

[TheCarp]

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.

Re:Allow me...

[david_thornley]

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.

Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came

[spun]

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.

Re:Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came

[Mongoose Disciple]

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.

Re:Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came

[amorsen]

Free Software.

Re:Yeah, 12 years since the hucksters came

[Stormwatch]

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.

You're kidding

[Bruce Perens]

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.