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'How I Coined the Term Open Source' (opensource.com)
Today is the 20th anniversary of the phrase "open source software," which this article says was coined by the executive director of the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on nanotech and artificial intelligence. The phrase first entered the world on February 3rd, 1998, according to Christine Peterson:
Of course, there are a number of accounts of the coining of the term, for example by Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman, yet this is mine, written on January 2, 2006. It has never been published, until today. The introduction of the term "open source software" was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users... Interest in free software was starting to grow outside the programming community, and it was increasingly clear that an opportunity was coming to change the world... [W]e discussed the need for a new term due to the confusion factor. The argument was as follows: those new to the term "free software" assume it is referring to the price. Oldtimers must then launch into an explanation, usually given as follows: "We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer." At this point, a discussion on software has turned into one about the price of an alcoholic beverage...
Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending -- in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me -- were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive -- a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic -- just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened...
Toward the end of the meeting, the question of terminology was brought up explicitly, probably by Todd or Eric. Maddog mentioned "freely distributable" as an earlier term, and "cooperatively developed" as a newer term. Eric listed "free software," "open source," and "sourceware" as the main options. Todd advocated the "open source" model, and Eric endorsed this... Eric Raymond was far better positioned to spread the new meme, and he did. Bruce Perens signed on to the effort immediately, helping set up Opensource.org and playing a key role in spreading the new term... By late February, both O'Reilly & Associates and Netscape had started to use the term. After this, there was a period during which the term was promoted by Eric Raymond to the media, by Tim O'Reilly to business, and by both to the programming community. It seemed to spread very quickly.
Peterson remembers that "These months were extremely exciting for open source," adding "Every week, it seemed, a new company announced plans to participate. Reading Slashdot became a necessity, even for those like me who were only peripherally involved. I strongly believe that the new term was helpful in enabling this rapid spread into business, which then enabled wider use by the public."
Wikipedia notes that Linus Torvalds endorsed the term the day after it was announced, that Phil Hughes backed it in Linux Journal, and that Richard Stallman "initially seemed to adopt the term, but later changed his mind."
Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending -- in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me -- were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive -- a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic -- just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened...
Toward the end of the meeting, the question of terminology was brought up explicitly, probably by Todd or Eric. Maddog mentioned "freely distributable" as an earlier term, and "cooperatively developed" as a newer term. Eric listed "free software," "open source," and "sourceware" as the main options. Todd advocated the "open source" model, and Eric endorsed this... Eric Raymond was far better positioned to spread the new meme, and he did. Bruce Perens signed on to the effort immediately, helping set up Opensource.org and playing a key role in spreading the new term... By late February, both O'Reilly & Associates and Netscape had started to use the term. After this, there was a period during which the term was promoted by Eric Raymond to the media, by Tim O'Reilly to business, and by both to the programming community. It seemed to spread very quickly.
Peterson remembers that "These months were extremely exciting for open source," adding "Every week, it seemed, a new company announced plans to participate. Reading Slashdot became a necessity, even for those like me who were only peripherally involved. I strongly believe that the new term was helpful in enabling this rapid spread into business, which then enabled wider use by the public."
Wikipedia notes that Linus Torvalds endorsed the term the day after it was announced, that Phil Hughes backed it in Linux Journal, and that Richard Stallman "initially seemed to adopt the term, but later changed his mind."
The tag "Open" was already heavily used with regards to software with a published API that could be implemented without royalty payments to the copyright holder. For example, "Open Software Foundation" dates back to the mid-80s.
Maybe this guy did come up with "Open Source". It reminds me of the Lamar Hunt, the owner of the KC Chiefs, who always bragged that he was the one who came up with the name "Super Bowl". But not the idea of having a world championship between the two big American pro football leagues at the time (NFL and AFL), and not all the hard work by hundreds or thousands of people that actually made it happen. These guys are just trivia answers.
It is interesting. I would have thought it was much older than 1998. There is indeed a big difference between Free software (a term coined in 1985) and open Source software. The term"free software" was always a hard sell as people would associate it with "gratis" rather than "libre". The term "open source" has it better from from that point of view. Still, it is not the same. While one can not imagine free software without having the code open, it is possible that maybe through patents, open source is not free. The definition given by the Gnu foundation makes this clear: "Open source is a term for developers, while free software is an ethical imperative". It might be necessary keep both terms: Free and open source (FOSS). I for myself always understood "Free software" already as "free and open source software". But the addition "open" makes sense in order not to get the "cheap" association.
So the cost of developing software is distributed across the entire economy for use by the entire economy in order to substantially reduce the cost post development and avoid wildly inflated licence costs based around monopoly control of segments of the digital market place.
This further extends into a properly founded education model. Where as students learn, they can contribute to existing open development software, to learn, demonstrates skill and gain employment opportunities. This is crippled by a lack of standards in operating systems and coding languages, standards that should be able to be applied internationally in order to create a sustainable, secure, stable, low costs international digital infrastructure. Computers should enhance the economy, not be a vampiric drain upon it, a destructive one, like the eg. M$ (not only exorbitant extortionate licence fees but poor business practices, invasion of privacy, attempts to control society via compulsory software install, corruption of standards, a generally practice of lies and deceit, poor software security, forced very expensive upgrades not just software licences which is a fraction of the cost, but retraining, document conversion, installation costs, the hah hah suckers costs, paying huge costs so M$ can get a tiny percentage of those capital losses as profit).
Open source software is very much a locavore model http://www.dictionary.com/brow... ie from M$, eat your own dogfood. The developmental control shifts to any local body able to sustain it ie a coalition of universities, sustaining, maintaining and developing the code with government funding at a fraction of the cost of the current model because even though the local effort is controlled locally (do you really want the US government to have a off switch on your digital economy, or any other country), the development effort is shared internationally, good for peace and stability.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
For anyone who has any doubt about this claim:
Here's the truth: https://web.archive.org/web/19...
We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. `Open source', contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.
Are they arguing over who should get marketing props?
I’m glad FOSS exists, regardless of the origin of the terminology.
#DeleteChrome
It was a certification mark originally
Hate to say it, but the linked article paints Stallman as an idiot.
Makes it seem like he reads "open" as sealed behind glass. Not "open" as in freely accessible.
I can understand there being a prevalence of confusion around the term "open", as source code was often available in the Unix and BSD worlds. However it does ring truer for me than "free". "Free" has never meant public domain, nor "open" during my life. "Free" has always meant "free as in beer".
Even more so, it isn't the software that is free, but me. "Open" implies freedom, as the doors are open. Which means I am free to use the software as I see fit.
I remember when the guys (Larry, Eric, etc..) came out of the room from this meeting. Eric was telling me about this newly coined phrase "Open Source". Chris DiBona and I'm not sure if Joe was there... several other guys too. It was really a great time to be alive and for me, being a fly on the wall.... it was amazing. The Feb 98 meeting is the first time I heard the term "Open Source" and I'm inclined to believe that was it's birth. Not sure about anything else.
geeky stuff I'm proud to have been a part of: linux.com / themes.org / sourceforge.net / sicnus.com
I'm the one who first coined the term, "RAM" to describe random access memory. It took me weeks to come up with it. Finally, after drinking half a bottle of absinthe, one night I had a dream about having sex with a sheep and...VOILA!...it came to me. RAM. Yep, that was all me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Except that, Open Source was used as a term to describe the software before it became a marketing term. I was alive and involved in the computing and "open source" software community (BBSes) at the time... I remember being confused as to why everyone was so excited that it "finally" achieved buzzword status. To me, it felt like the privileged were once again coopting grass-roots terms for their own egotistical benefit. Some things never change.
If there's documentation of this out there link it! Better to get it straight now before it all gets lost to time.
Is it any wonder why only a handful of FOSS projects have had widespread adoption and success, while most are pesky little tribes of infighting and pot shots?
For anyone who has any doubt about this claim:
Here's the truth:
Caldera Announces Open Source for DOS, Sept. 10, 1996. There, FTFY. I know people have become a bit tired of me harping on about this, but the fact is that the phrase "Open Source" was in well-established usage years before any of these people claim to have invented it. And what's more, all of them should know it. Caldera didn't invent the term either! It was already in common use among internet-savvy programmer types when Caldera used it! "Open" has been used to describe the interoperability of Unix systems since at least the 1980s, and the phrase "Open Source" was already being used around communities like Santa Cruz (where SCO was, hence the name) which were heavy on software developers to describe software whose source code you could get your hands on for free. If only Google hadn't completely neutered the search interface on Groups, I'm sure I could find more citations...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Caldera Announces Open Source for DOS.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are they arguing over who should get marketing props?
They are, and it's pathetic, because they are ignorant at best. My particular dog in this fight is not wanting the OSI to be in charge of what you can call Open Source. They wanted to be in charge of it before, their legal counsel advised them against it, and they decided against attempting to establish such a trademark. Hopefully that bird has already flown the coop, but self-aggrandizement like this could lead to actual attempts. I'm not trying to make myself look great, I'm trying to prevent a hijacking.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thank you for correcting me! I only verified her claim not the larger claim of inventing the term, I should know better! /. please bury my original comment!
I prefer the term "open software".
Absent explanation, the term "open" in computing means interoperable. Since the eighties, Unix systems have been described as "open" due to their conformance to published standards.
The term "open source" on face value only implies "source available".
Yep. And that's all it means.
But I believe the most important feature of open software is that it allows people to create and distribute modified versions.
Nope. All it means is source code access. It doesn't imply the freedom to redistribute changed binaries, only patches.
"Open Source", as defined by OSI, should be capitalized, which it isn't in this summary.
The OSI does not get to define the phrase Open Source, because they did not invent it (not even, as they claim, pertaining solely to software!)
Yes, the term "Free Software" on face value only implies that one can use it without payment,
That's only if you hear "free" and automatically think "I don't have to pay". Some people hear "free" and think "not in bondage". In some countries, Free Software is called Software Libre, which suggests freedom. But "Open Source" is, frankly, an even worse term. You can construe that to mean basically anything — and the OSI is trying.
There are ways to licence software that, while its source can be viewed, modified, and re-published, requires payment for production use. I'd still call such packages "open software",
You can call them whatever you want, but if the users can get the sources, then they're Open Source by definition. Whose definition? The people who were using it as such before the OSI even existed. In fact, the people that the leading lights of the OSI certainly heard the phrase from, before they claim to have invented it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Google may have neutered the search interface, but it's still up to this particular job :
Just search for: "open source" before:1995/01/01
There's lots and lots of things that aren't what we're looking for -- but more than a few that are. Such as this from 1990 or this from 1989, or this from 1985, though this last one isn't about computer software -- but the idea is still very much the same.
You get the idea.
That 1985 reference is the earliest one I find in what Google has archived of Usenet.
Interesting... I didn’t know that about Caldera.
Also that mention of (the real) SCO from back in the day made me rather sad.
#DeleteChrome
What might you might need to reconsider is what matters most to you in this topic.
it's a shame it's now so difficult to find posts from Carl Lydick. They're good for countless hours of entertainment and enlightenment.
I think more people need to at least give open source (or whatever you want to call it) projects a try. I've tried a number of projects over the years. Not all open source projects are created equal, but I certainly don't regret trying things like Libre Office. Is it for everyone? No. Should people at least try it and decide for themselves? Yes. It doesn't have to be a whole OS. Small apps work fine.
Daily read for tech news: Freezenet.ca
Absent explanation, the term "open" in computing means interoperable. Since the eighties, Unix systems have been described as "open" due to their conformance to published standards.
Few think that "open" means "open standard". Proprietary software that's interoperable because one can interface with a published API certainly isn't called "open".
The term "open source" on face value only implies "source available".
Yep. And that's all it means.
Uncapitalized and on face value yes. But the OSI definition includes the full libre criteria, and most developers now associate the uncapitalized term with this definition (even in this article).
But I believe the most important feature of open software is that it allows people to create and distribute modified versions.
Nope. All it means is source code access. It doesn't imply the freedom to redistribute changed binaries, only patches.
I'm not talking about terms and definitions here, but calling out what I see as the most important aspect of Free Software.
"Open Source", as defined by OSI, should be capitalized, which it isn't in this summary.
The OSI does not get to define the phrase Open Source, because they did not invent it (not even, as they claim, pertaining solely to software!)
OSI did invent the term "open source" as a more descriptive term than "free software" for MIT- and GPL-type licences. The article to which you linked found an earlier use of "open source" that only meant "source available". As I said above, "open source" now means more than this in most people's minds.
Yes, the term "Free Software" on face value only implies that one can use it without payment,
That's only if you hear "free" and automatically think "I don't have to pay". Some people hear "free" and think "not in bondage". In some countries, Free Software is called Software Libre, which suggests freedom. But "Open Source" is, frankly, an even worse term. You can construe that to mean basically anything — and the OSI is trying.
The ambiguity of "free" in English was a major reason for the introduction of the "Open Source" term by the OSI.
The really fascinating part of the story is the inner workings of a subtle campaign to defang the Free Software movement of its social component: meme engineering, "education", and publisher-Wikipedia feedback loops: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/....
A long read, but worth every minute.
The intelligence community has been using "open source" for decades to describe any unclassified information that can be publicly obtained, e.g. newspapers, books, stuff in plain view, etc. Reasonably similar meaning, given open source software means the code is public.
In all three of those citations the term open source is meant to reference unclassified information.
OSI did invent the term "open source" as a more descriptive term than "free software" for MIT- and GPL-type licences.
They don't get to do that, because they don't own the term Open Source, which predates the OSI.
The article to which you linked found an earlier use of "open source" that only meant "source available".
Yes, you've got it in one. The OSI is attempting to redefine a term which was already in common use at the time they created themselves in an attempt to control it.
The ambiguity of "free" in English was a major reason for the introduction of the "Open Source" term by the OSI.
They didn't introduce it. People (including me) were using it before the OSI even existed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
just think of compiling anything on a Pentium 133MHz computer at the time...
Pentium? Surely you jest! We ran circus.com on a hand-me-down 486DX4-100 with 16MB RAM... and Caldera Network Desktop. And that machine not only served webpages to the world for many years, but it also ran samba, netatalk, and NFS to provide filesharing services to windows, macintosh, and Unix clients respectively, including booting my SLC into Xkernel and displaying Netscape (2.x IIRC) back on it, and supporting a local user logging in through a vt100.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Open Group is the holder of the UNIX trade mark. It was established in 1988.
This one? https://blogs.s-osg.org/about/
"The Open Source Group was formed in 2013 to do the following..."
[You refuse to give credit] Because she's a woman. Bow, fuckers.
Well, she's a woman now.
At the time, though, she was Chris Peterson, not Christine.[1] [2]
I first heard of the term "Open source" in the late 1980's in connection with a freely available dos game at time called Moria. To the best of my knowledge, it was the original author tgat used the term "open source" to describe the project and he was supposedly not involved in the project anymore by the time I heard of the game (1988 or so). I expect that the origins of the term might go back even further.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I attended UC San Diego from 1981 to 1986, where we used GNU (not Gosling) Emacs and pre-release versions of GCC to hack on BSD 4.1-4.3 in several of my classes. Even then the strain between the many dimensions surrounding software development and use were evident: closed vs. shared source, free vs. commercial distribution, public domain vs. rent vs. own licensing, and so on, most of which persist to this day. Back then, the issues were made evident by the standoff between AT&T (UNIX) and DECUS (DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) User Society), who distributed BSD via "DECUS tapes" for DEC platforms (especially for the then-new VAX-11 systems).
Many philosophical discussions debated the relative merits of the situation. The problem, for me, was disentangling the conflated issues, which demanded a focus on making words have specific meanings within the software context, rather than the free-for-all of pithy phrases then ruling the interwebs (USENET, at the time).
The commercial software industry had defined itself fairly well, leaving "everything else" as "non-commercial", which, aside from being a vague catch-all, created an artificial boundary that was quite ably crossed by "dual-licensed" software. Within the non-commercial arena, we had GNU at one end, placing a legal/moral/ethical stake in the ground, and those who favored more of a libertarian or laissez-faire approach. And, of course, the many left wandering between those extremes.
My own small contribution to the discussion was an attempt to frame non-commercial software as "Communal Software", where each project was it's own community that would have its own non-commercial rules, much like a housing development would have a homeowner's association (HOA) and a Code of Community Responsibility (CCRs). Software communities could federate when they shared common governance and rules/licensing. My hope was that this would encourage folks to try different things, and see which approaches worked best for which situations.
As a bottom-up approach it received some discussion, but GNU (and later OSI, the Open Source Initiative) had louder voices arguing for a top-down approach. The net result has been those two being the primary non-commercial camps, with BSD/MIT licenses filling many of the gaps between each of them and the commercial community, with more recent contributions from Creative Commons (CC). The top-down approach gained speed as non-commercial distribution shifted from physical media (tapes, floppies) to online (FTP, USENET alt.binaries, Gopher, and later communities such as SourceForge). Mass distribution encouraged reducing the number of licensing strategies.
While much has been done to clarify the terms we use, there still is way too much confusion still present in most discussions, with many folks talking over each other without realizing they are using language differently.
Any lexicographers and philosophers want to take a stab at improving our linguistic landscape?
Yeah? Well I landed on the moon in 1967, but my camera broke down.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In all three of those citations the term open source is meant to reference unclassified information.
Indeed, I just verified that what you said is very plausibly true at least for the 1989 one. A search of usenet archives however does seem to be the right way to go about investigating the issue. I just did some strolling down memory lane by reading slackware-3.0 documentation and was somewhat surprised I didn't see the term there. I tend to agree (with far from total recall) with the other commenter/s who suggest the term was used and understood to mean 'source available' before it was 'adopted' and given a narrower definition which subsequently was accepted by some mainstream communities. Perhaps "Open Source" has a differing 'coining' genesis than "open source". I certainly get the impression there is and has been a fair amount of orwellian attempts to rewrite history for various common terms. Even if that's not exactly what is going on here, it's something to watch out for. Tiananmen Square Massacre has a different ring to it than June Fourth Incident.
-some other dmc
Also that mention of (the real) SCO from back in the day made me rather sad.
As usual, I'm just wistful that I wasn't born sooner. I participated in geek culture in Santa Cruz and thus knew a bunch of SCO employees who were in the social scene, and still keep up with a few of them. SCO was once one of the classic Unix shops, with a diverse and developed culture. Open-access SCO systems gorn (The Planet Gorn) and Deep Thought (which still exists!) were, alongside some of UCSC's hardware and a few of the local BBSes, cornerstones of the local nerd community. But I was born years after most of that crowd, and missed out on most of the best parties, the SCO hot tub...
Another open-standards vendor which existed in the neighborhood was TGV, aka "Two guys and a VAX". Besides the mainframe mouse, their claim to fame was creation of a TCP stack for VMS. They followed that on with the TCP stack for Windows 3.x, which had far and away the best performance. You could feasibly use a Windows machine as a small router. Once upon a time, that meant a lot of seats, for not that many employees (though more than two.) They were working on a TCP stack for Windows 9x for some reason when they were bought by Cisco and turned into a Cable Modem development lab.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Unfortunately using copyright to protect free software is a lot like using a Jackal to guard the hens.
Using copyright to protect free software is genius because most of the problems with software are caused by copyright. If software copyrights were to be abolished, then we would scarcely need it.
No, you're confusing gratis with libre. Eliminating copyright might result in a lot more freeware (because of the removal of the restriction on redistribution of compiled binary software) but it doesn't suddenly mean anybody can get access to the code used to build those binaries. You would end up with a permissive (BSD, Apache) environment rather than a restrictive (GPL) environment, people would be free to make modifications and distribute those without the accompanying source code in the same way proprietary software vendors do now except without the monetary cost.
I would gather the Intelligence Community had been using the term for decades hitherto.
I remember an unclassified "Open Source" mini-convention in D.C. some years back. Some programmer attended thinking it was something else and complained about how "evil" they were, collecting Intel from "open sources".
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I'm positive I first heard the term "open source" in the 1980's associated with a specific software product that I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but I can find absolutely no reference to the term at all that I can positively prove today that the term was actually in use (with respect to software) at the time. What if we're all completely wrong, and we just think we are right for some weird reason?
If no evidence of this can be produced in the present, how do we know that we are not, in fact, misremembering?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sorry, the Open Group talked about Open Software, not open source Software. You may remember using the term open source, but your memory is faulty.
Breakfast served all day!
In google groups,
"open source software" : before:2009/01/01, no hits.
"open source software" : before:2010/01/01, 44 hits.
So the full phrase hit groups about 2009 where just "open source" went back much further and had additional meanings besides code. I am actually surprised it took that long for the phrase to start being used in the groups. (There is a good chance google is broken. The word "meme" does not show up till 2010 and I know there was a memetics groups earlier.)
I knew Chris Peterson clear back to when she was in MIT. I suspect Chris would have made serious technical contributions if she had not decided that a non-profit supporting nanotechnology development was more important. As you can expect from people who graduate from MIT, she is very sharp.
My that was a long time ago!
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
We agree that the use of the term "Open Source" for libre licences is misleading. But it's now impossible to reclaim its original source-available definition.
I really do think that "open software" is good term for libre software licenses that allow anyone to view the source, build the software, modify it, and release modified versions — but not necessarily not having to pay to run either the original or a modified/expanded version (gratis software).