10-Year Anniversary of Open Source

Bruce Perens writes "Saturday is the 10-Year Anniversary of Open Source, the initiative to promote Free Software to business. Obviously, it's been incredibly successful. I've submitted a State of Open Source message discussing the anniversary of Open Source, its successes, and the challenges it will face in the upcoming decade."

I think you mean "Open Source"

[Filter]

Not open source.

10 years - not hardly

[Mycroft_514]

The first open source project I participated in was from around 1985-1996. The prject itself pre-dated that even.

Try to get over yourselves people.

Correction: free software is the success

[argoff]

Open Source is a trademark group, but the real success has been free (an in GPL) software. Economic forces alone have pushed growth in this area up way above 20% per year in many areas, but the Open Source movement was sort of drug along by the coat tales. I'm not saying it's hasn't accomplished a lot, but pure economic forces would have forced this growth anyhow even if the Open Source group never formed.

Re:Surprised by Wealth!

[Bruce Perens]

Surprised by Wealth was Eric Raymond, not me. I wouldn't ever have written that, and Eric claims he lost all the money because he never sold the stock. Holy toledo. My biggest IPO was Pixar. I made a little money on various friends-and-family things from Linux companies. Wasn't involved in LinuxCare. :-)

Re:Not 10 years: thank ESR for the lies

[Bruce Perens]

We certainly had Free Software before then, and whatever BSD made. But as far as I'm aware, the coining of the term Open Source as another name for Free Software was by Christine Petersen (then-wife of nanotechnology guru Eric Drexler) on one of the first days of February 1998. I think it might have been February 1, and Eric called me the day after the meeting where that happened.

Of course, the words "Open Source" could have been used that way before then, but we can't find any record. Since Open Source Definition only got done (as the Debian Free Software Guidelines) in July 1997, whatever was referred to before then wasn't quite what we know as Open Source today.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:10 years - not hardly

[Bruce Perens]

I know. I made a point, really early in the article, of going over Free Software, Richard Stallman, and the fact that he started in the early 80's. FYI, my first Free Software program, Electric Fence was published from Pixar in 1987.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Surprised by Wealth!

[Bruce Perens]

How can you look at Zimbra and MySQL and think the boom mentality was then?

Technocrat.net has been back for a while. If you did know that and don't like its current editorial content, I could really use some better article submissions. I've got to take most anything people submit right now because it's slim pickings. But not over here at Slashdot, darn it.

New projects in the wings: a start-up company called Kiloboot. Product not announced yet. An American version of FFII.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Misleading use of capital letters

[Intron]

When I first started writing code in the 70's there were still serious arguments about whether code could even be protected by copyrights. It wasn't until the "Pineapple" [cornell.edu] case in the early 80's that it was settled. The Pineapple contained Apple's ROM code and their claim was that you couldn't copyright binary data. They lost, of course.

Re:I'm so sick of "Open Source" it's bogus!

[Bruce Perens]

Here's Richard Stallman's statement on the issue, which he made during a joint speech we did in Italy:

Free software and Open Source seem quite similar, if you look only at their software development practices. At the philosophical level, the difference is extreme. The Free Software Movement is a social movement for computer users' freedom. The Open Source philosophy cites practical, economic benefits. A deeper difference cannot be imagined.

The origin of Open Source lies in a practice that could have come from Dale Carnegie: if you seek to persuade someone, present the case in terms of his values and desires. For persuading business executives, citing practical, economic advantages can be effective. By all means do so, if it feels right to you, when speaking privately to executives.

Talking to the public is something else entirely. When we talk to the public, we promote whatever values we cite. If we cite only practical, economic advantages, and not freedom, we encourage people to value practical advantages and not value freedom.

Those values make our community weak. People who prefer a state of freedom only for the secondary practical and economic advantages it brings do not appreciate freedom itself, and they will not fight to defend it.

This is the reason I stated, in my joint speech with Bruce Perens, for not supporting the practice of presenting Free Software in public in the limited economic terms of Open Source.

Now, obviously, I think that Open Source evangelists like me have a role in talking with business people that Richard can't fill. His brain wiring isn't built for it. The a priori arguments he makes are not the way to start selling these concepts to business people, but hopefully they will eventually come to appreciate Richard's arguments after they enter through Open Source. Obviously, I don't want to erode the goals of the Free Software campaign at all. I'm out to help people understand Free Software with a gentle introduction. I tried to make that clear in the article.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Not 10 years: thank ESR for the lies

[Bruce Perens]

This is sort of moot, because IMO the Open Source Definition was the big deal, and the fact that we had a campaign rather than just a term was a big deal too. Stallman had not bothered to set a Free Software Definition in writing at that time, he actually wrote and told me that what I had written was a good definiton of Free Software.

The references you point out refer to the presence of source code, not the presence of licensing that assures the right to redistribute, modify, and use. BSD did provide that sort of licensing, but it was just called BSD licensing. The only campaign for developers to provide those things at the time was called Free Software.

Actually, there was a regular use of the term open source at that time, to refer to a form of military intelligence.

But I really did invent the term "nojomofo" Bwahh haha ha! :-)

Re:Surprised by Wealth!

[Bruce Perens]

Technocrat.net is still mine, although I actually lost the domain once and some nice folks rescued it for me. Wow. Anyway, I take the adsense revenue and pay Zogger with it. I can't always be there to run articles, and he's there much more frequently.

Bruce

Re:I'm so sick of "Open Source" it's bogus!

[Bruce Perens]

The whole ESR Cathedral blather is an embarrassment, in most professional circles it is an hysterical joke.

It's obsolete. ESR wrote it before IBM stepped into the picture, etc. I invite you to read The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source [perens.com]. At least one now-professional has based his thesis on this paper.

I think the major difference in objectives between Open Source and Free Software evangelists is that the Free Software folks say that proprietary software does not have a right to exist. Unfortunately, I can't say that and win the argument where it's important to win. You have to sound fair to everybody to win with politicians, if you ask to disenfranchise someone else you generally won't get very far.

Sorry if you don't buy that, and we'll have to agree to disagree.

Thanks

Bruce

Celebrate them all

[SST-206]

Silver Jubilee!

• 2008 is 25 years since 1983, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project.
• 2009 is 25 years since 1984, when software development for the GNU operating system began.
• 2010 is 25 years since 1985, when the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October.

Who's going to write the press releases?

Re:Celebrate them all

[Bruce Perens]

Talk with Peter Brown. FSF has a publicist who can help.

Re:I think you mean "Open Source"

[eln]

More accurately the "Open Source Initiative", which is the effort to water down the Free Software philosophy until it appeals to business types.

Re:Correction: free software is the success

[Russ Nelson]

RMS would be a better advocate for freedom if he wasn't such a hideous leftist. He should read _The Road to Serfdom_, but as far as I know, he never read the copy of _Economics in One Lesson_ that I sent him.