Slashdot Mirror
Interviews: Ask a Question To Christine Peterson, the Nanotech Expert Who Coined the Term 'Open Source'
Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998. Now Christine's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers. We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
Interestingly, Christine was also on the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on the state of California's nanotechnology task force. Her tech talks at conferences include "Life Extension for Geeks" at Gnomedex and "Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security" at the 2007 Singularity Summit. Another talk argues that the nanotech revolution will be like the information revolution, except that "Instead of with bits, we should do it with atoms," allowing molecule-sized machines that can kill cancer and repair DNA. Her most recent publication is "Cyber, Nano, and AGI RIsks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks." Christine graduated from MIT with a bachelors in chemistry.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
Interestingly, Christine was also on the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on the state of California's nanotechnology task force. Her tech talks at conferences include "Life Extension for Geeks" at Gnomedex and "Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security" at the 2007 Singularity Summit. Another talk argues that the nanotech revolution will be like the information revolution, except that "Instead of with bits, we should do it with atoms," allowing molecule-sized machines that can kill cancer and repair DNA. Her most recent publication is "Cyber, Nano, and AGI RIsks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks." Christine graduated from MIT with a bachelors in chemistry.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
There is no "top secret" work that is 50 years ahead. If there were, those people would quit and make billions in industry. You live in a fantasy world.
or are you warming up for the OSI to make a run at copyrighting the phrase?
That would be sort of hard when the US copyright law disallows the copyrighting short phrases and this backed up by the USPTO. One can get a trademark on a phrase but tyat is not the same as a copyright. If you’re going to try to sound smart at least learn something about the subject before blabbing.
In the late 1980s every software on UNIX still came with source code so you could build it yourself.
That dos not make it "open source".
I built hundreds of kernels for Sun OS, early Solaris and DEC Ultrix. Of course most software I built was "open source" or early GPL.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Open standards" isn't remotely the same thing as open source. (Just because you can see someone's source code doesn't mean you can modify the source code, let alone re-distribute it.)
I can't believe you're raving about proprietary software like it's somehow a good thing because they let you glimpse their source code once in a while.
You can be bought pretty cheap, drinkypoo.
> it was all that we meant when we said "Open Source"
You've been pushing this lie a long time, but in fact there was no significant usage of the term "open source" before 1998. You've scoured the cosmos for anyone who happened to use the words open and/or source and glomming onto product names with the word "open" and then using it to act like the OSI is the bad guy.
I understand that you think you're helping free software by attacking open source software -- but you take it too far when you also fabricate out of thin out this idea that people were using the phrase "open source software" before 1998. And you also denigrate all the work and contributions of the (actual) open source movement which began in 1998.
"Proprietary code! Never ever touch it! Never modify it! Don't even think about re-distributing it!" That's what Caldera's talking about -- and it's evil.
I can remember when Slashdot used to understand the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary code.
Martin. There's a certain company out in San Diego that we all know, parts maker and patent troll. They are working to put royalty-bearing patents in modern standards. They are using the exact same language as you at the standards committees, telling us that "there isn't one Open Source" and then going on to tell us that Open Source should only be about copyright, and that there should be patent royalties in standards that - regardless of what they say about its being only about copyright - Open Source would then not be allowed to implement. Unfortunately, they are gaining traction in important standards committees, especially the national ones.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not working for these guys, you sound exactly like you are. What you are doing hurts both Free Software and Open Source (they are really the same). As I fly around the world to educate standards committees about the Open Source Definition and what they really need to do to accommodate Open Source in standards, they're going to be pointing at your words and using them against me.
This is really important. For medical reasons, this is probably the last decade of my life, and I am spending a good part of it to work on this issue. You're getting in the way. Cut it out. I promise that nobody can trademark the words "Open Source" today, and you are feeling threatened for nothing.
Bruce Perens.
I've provided literally exactly as much proof for this statement as Christine Peterson has provided
...worked at Caldera through 2001, and has publicly said that he doesn't remember whether it was before or after 1998 that his open source advocacy began.
This is false. Eye-witness Eric Raymond supports Christine Peterson's statement. But you're just making things up.
Lyle Ball...
You're also being weasly. Ball says he used the phrase "broadly" -- which you like to pretend means "used all the time" when it actually means "we used a broad definition, not the one everyone has been using for the last 20 years."
I believe you're intentionally conflating source-viewable code with the entirely different concept of "code you can actually change and redistribute." And you're doing it because you believe it hurts the Open Source Initiative, which you believe helps free software. As part of this malicious effort, you're finding stray instances of people revealing their (non-modifable) source code and acting like it proves Christine Peterson/the OSI are bad people who are lying.
You've been pushing this lie a long time, but in fact there was no significant usage of the term "open source" before 1998.
Significant? So tell me, which one should we consider more significant?
Someone uttering a term at a meeting in February 1998 (that everyone familiar with OpenBSD should have already been familiar with).
Or someone using that term and putting it into actual practice with an actual repository and an actual domain name in 1995.
Tell me, do you believe the same thing about patents? That it's not the earlier practitioner, but the later person that supposedly gets the "idea" that should get the entire credit for it. Do you realize how ludicrous this sounds?
As part of this malicious effort, you're finding stray instances of people revealing their (non-modifable) source code and acting like it proves Christine Peterson/the OSI are bad people who are lying.
Please stop with the persecution complex, no one is calling anyone a liar. People repeat things they've previously heard all the time. That doesn't make them liars or bad people. That just makes them human beings, just like the rest of us. And yes, it's possible for human beings to be mistaken.
And no, OpenBSD was not "(non-modifiable)". It was modifiable. It just wasn't copyleft. Have you even heard of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license?
And no, I'm not trying to demean the copyleft licensing model. In fact, I find that licensing model far superior to anything else we've got. And the OSI folks should be proud of what they have accomplished. If anything, the only demeaning thing is the fact that some are unwilling to admit a minor mistake of original attribution (which is actually important in our circles) and just move on with far more important things to do.
Do you have any evidence that anyone familiar with OpenBSD was using the term "open source" back then consistently or frequently? Because I have yet to see any.