5 ms·

Linus Torvalds Remembers the Days Before ‘Open Source’

48 points by ogcricket 9y ago

jgh 9y ago
This seems to be an article about the origin of the term "open source" and not about what the world was like before open source. I also found it funny that Linus' original response to the question was "I honestly don't remember".
- jordigh 9y ago
  An amazing amount of people forget what this was like and think that we've always had "open source", whatever it was called. Many will vehemently argue against the OSI definition of open source, despite them coining the term, because they're very convinced that everyone knew what open source was in 1995 and everyone used it since at least 1970. It's important to remember this history. In a way, free software (or open source) was the only way to originally do software. You bought a machine, and the manufacturer would just give you the source code, because how could you operate the machine otherwise? People didn't even think software was copyrightable at first. Whenever you have old people like rms mourning about the current state of software, that's because they remember what it was like when all software was free. This happened, and remembering the origins of the term "open source" is a way to memorialise that. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...
realworldview 9y ago
What a strange article. Clearly disturbed by the values and _confusion_ with the term free, it doesn’t delve into the significant body of work that existed prior to 1998, except for a passing quote, and how such software enabled many things, including the Linux Kernel. I can only presume the ad space associated with this article is valuable because it certainly isn’t an historically interesting or accurate piece.
manyoso 9y ago
The title is misleading. It really isn't about Linus' memories of days before "Open Source" so much as trying to figure out who coined the term.
- smudgymcscmudge 9y ago
  I think the quotes in the title make it clear that it’s about the term. I’m not sure the quotes were there when you commented, for hn makes a habit of correcting titles.
  - beegeezuz 9y ago
    I was reading it the same as the previous guy...
smudgymcscmudge 9y ago
I have to admit that the switch from “free software” to “open source” worked on me. Early in my career I was intrigued by the idea, but couldn’t get past how “free” software was a sustainable model. I started to get it at around the same time the terminology changed. On a related note, I heard the word shareware last week. It made me happy when I realized how long it had been since I had thought about shareware.
- jordigh 9y ago
  And what about now, how do you think that open source is good for business in ways free software is not? I think the majority opinion, judging by the likes of gitlab, is to use some or a lot of open source to entice people to pay you for plain ol' proprietary software. Closed shell, or open core. It looks like there's only room for one RedHat in the world, only one company who truly sells free software. As I understand it, you can pay Red Hat for access to their repos, which provide free software with source code, and nothing else. They really do plainly sell free software, but I think they call it "self-supported" or similar. edit: I'm of course aware that RH sells support. I just don't know any other company that plainly sells free software like RH also does. I wonder why no one else even tries.
  - dec0dedab0de 9y ago
    Redhat also sells support contracts, and (previously?) non free software as premium options.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    Redhat and Canonical both sell support and services, not just software. I believe there are other companies of lesser size doing this as well, possibly all the way down to individuals where lines are blurred.
  - smudgymcscmudge 9y ago
    My previous reply wasn't clear. It wasn't the difference between the meanings of open source and free software that changed my mind. It was the terminology change that helped rid me of the mental image of working for free. Now I realize there is a world of difference between free and open source software, but I didn't know that at the time. As for now, I think free software is good for business. My company works on dozens of free libraries, and it's good for our business because we end up running better code than what we could write by ourselves. When you consider whether it is "good for business", you need to consider that most businesses don't sell software. Of course GitLab and others won't ever be able to sell free software, but that doesn't mean it isn't good for business. I have mixed feelings about open source projects that are built by single companies who sell enterprise versions. It's often handy to have them around, but I wouldn't consider contributing anything significant to them after seeing instances where PRs remain unmerged because they compete with the enterprise-version.
mmjaa 9y ago
I'm old enough to remember the days when saying something was "Open Source" meant, simply, we had the sources for something and could use them for our needs. Around .. '84 / '85, there used to be these great little systems from MIPS that ran Risc/OS. Any time we'd get an update to Risc/OS, we'd spend a few days rebuilding drivers and whatnot, for our production systems - these drivers were "open source", in that they required us to compile them ourselves. (I think they were from the PROGRESS RDBMS product...) Back in the days of USENET, any code that was posted to groups like comp.lang.c was considered 'open source' - it was just a description of the sources, whether they were available or not. There wasn't any attribution of value - whether it was free or not - just whether or not we had access to it .. or not. Nowadays there is all sorts of stigma and hubris around the subject - but back when computers were something you had to visit in a special room designed for the purpose, all it really meant was whether we had permission to read the source - and do things with it - or not. There wasn't a commercial value assignment, really, until the mid-90's, when people realised there was immense value in open source business models (RedHat, et al.) ...
- jordigh 9y ago
  > Back in the days of USENET, any code that was posted to groups like comp.lang.c was considered 'open source' If this were true, you should be able to find many Usenet postings that use this term to describe the software. We have the archives. The article indeed attempts this search and doesn't find it. There is an unrelated older meaning of "open source" from "open source intelligence", but the idea that the meaning of "open source" as "source visible" was widespread before 1998 seems false. Perhaps some people had heard of it, but it was not widely understood. Indeed, in the article, two of the Usenet hits for "open source" are "open source material", which can be disregarded as the older meaning of "open source intelligence", which means to collect data from people from things like phone books. The other hit is of dubious meaning.
  - mmjaa 9y ago
    Re: Usenet, I believe that the point we're both orbiting around is that for as long as source code has been 'a thing', we've had to share it among ourselves to do anything decent with it. There is certainly an event horizon wherein computing platforms became entirely too sophisticated to support 'open source' everything - at a very early period of computing history, perhaps - but I do believe that source code has always been open. Its the fact of code going closed, multiple times, and now persistently, that is confabulating everything. I maintain this is the inverse function.

48 points by ogcricket 9y ago

jgh 9y ago

This seems to be an article about the origin of the term "open source" and not about what the world was like before open source. I also found it funny that Linus' original response to the question was "I honestly don't remember".

jordigh 9y ago
An amazing amount of people forget what this was like and think that we've always had "open source", whatever it was called. Many will vehemently argue against the OSI definition of open source, despite them coining the term, because they're very convinced that everyone knew what open source was in 1995 and everyone used it since at least 1970. It's important to remember this history. In a way, free software (or open source) was the only way to originally do software. You bought a machine, and the manufacturer would just give you the source code, because how could you operate the machine otherwise? People didn't even think software was copyrightable at first. Whenever you have old people like rms mourning about the current state of software, that's because they remember what it was like when all software was free. This happened, and remembering the origins of the term "open source" is a way to memorialise that. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...

realworldview 9y ago

What a strange article. Clearly disturbed by the values and _confusion_ with the term free, it doesn’t delve into the significant body of work that existed prior to 1998, except for a passing quote, and how such software enabled many things, including the Linux Kernel. I can only presume the ad space associated with this article is valuable because it certainly isn’t an historically interesting or accurate piece.

manyoso 9y ago

The title is misleading. It really isn't about Linus' memories of days before "Open Source" so much as trying to figure out who coined the term.

smudgymcscmudge 9y ago
I think the quotes in the title make it clear that it’s about the term. I’m not sure the quotes were there when you commented, for hn makes a habit of correcting titles.
- beegeezuz 9y ago
  I was reading it the same as the previous guy...

smudgymcscmudge 9y ago

I have to admit that the switch from “free software” to “open source” worked on me. Early in my career I was intrigued by the idea, but couldn’t get past how “free” software was a sustainable model. I started to get it at around the same time the terminology changed. On a related note, I heard the word shareware last week. It made me happy when I realized how long it had been since I had thought about shareware.

jordigh 9y ago
And what about now, how do you think that open source is good for business in ways free software is not? I think the majority opinion, judging by the likes of gitlab, is to use some or a lot of open source to entice people to pay you for plain ol' proprietary software. Closed shell, or open core. It looks like there's only room for one RedHat in the world, only one company who truly sells free software. As I understand it, you can pay Red Hat for access to their repos, which provide free software with source code, and nothing else. They really do plainly sell free software, but I think they call it "self-supported" or similar. edit: I'm of course aware that RH sells support. I just don't know any other company that plainly sells free software like RH also does. I wonder why no one else even tries.
- dec0dedab0de 9y ago
  Redhat also sells support contracts, and (previously?) non free software as premium options.
- phkahler 9y ago
  Redhat and Canonical both sell support and services, not just software. I believe there are other companies of lesser size doing this as well, possibly all the way down to individuals where lines are blurred.
- smudgymcscmudge 9y ago
  My previous reply wasn't clear. It wasn't the difference between the meanings of open source and free software that changed my mind. It was the terminology change that helped rid me of the mental image of working for free. Now I realize there is a world of difference between free and open source software, but I didn't know that at the time. As for now, I think free software is good for business. My company works on dozens of free libraries, and it's good for our business because we end up running better code than what we could write by ourselves. When you consider whether it is "good for business", you need to consider that most businesses don't sell software. Of course GitLab and others won't ever be able to sell free software, but that doesn't mean it isn't good for business. I have mixed feelings about open source projects that are built by single companies who sell enterprise versions. It's often handy to have them around, but I wouldn't consider contributing anything significant to them after seeing instances where PRs remain unmerged because they compete with the enterprise-version.

mmjaa 9y ago

I'm old enough to remember the days when saying something was "Open Source" meant, simply, we had the sources for something and could use them for our needs. Around .. '84 / '85, there used to be these great little systems from MIPS that ran Risc/OS. Any time we'd get an update to Risc/OS, we'd spend a few days rebuilding drivers and whatnot, for our production systems - these drivers were "open source", in that they required us to compile them ourselves. (I think they were from the PROGRESS RDBMS product...) Back in the days of USENET, any code that was posted to groups like comp.lang.c was considered 'open source' - it was just a description of the sources, whether they were available or not. There wasn't any attribution of value - whether it was free or not - just whether or not we had access to it .. or not. Nowadays there is all sorts of stigma and hubris around the subject - but back when computers were something you had to visit in a special room designed for the purpose, all it really meant was whether we had permission to read the source - and do things with it - or not. There wasn't a commercial value assignment, really, until the mid-90's, when people realised there was immense value in open source business models (RedHat, et al.) ...

jordigh 9y ago
> Back in the days of USENET, any code that was posted to groups like comp.lang.c was considered 'open source' If this were true, you should be able to find many Usenet postings that use this term to describe the software. We have the archives. The article indeed attempts this search and doesn't find it. There is an unrelated older meaning of "open source" from "open source intelligence", but the idea that the meaning of "open source" as "source visible" was widespread before 1998 seems false. Perhaps some people had heard of it, but it was not widely understood. Indeed, in the article, two of the Usenet hits for "open source" are "open source material", which can be disregarded as the older meaning of "open source intelligence", which means to collect data from people from things like phone books. The other hit is of dubious meaning.
- mmjaa 9y ago
  Re: Usenet, I believe that the point we're both orbiting around is that for as long as source code has been 'a thing', we've had to share it among ourselves to do anything decent with it. There is certainly an event horizon wherein computing platforms became entirely too sophisticated to support 'open source' everything - at a very early period of computing history, perhaps - but I do believe that source code has always been open. Its the fact of code going closed, multiple times, and now persistently, that is confabulating everything. I maintain this is the inverse function.