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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. A
by 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 agoRe: 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.
- jordigh 9y agoSure, there's plenty of evidence that the attitude to share code existed and that in the beginning nobody even thought you could copyright software. But calling it "open source" is a relatively recent thing.
- astrodust 9y agoLike a fish in water, a lot of the "open source" world didn't realize what it was dealing with. Of course source code was open! How else could you spend hours trying to compile it properly? I spent three days trying to get one of the very early versions of Mosaic to compile on an SGI Indy and never did get it to work. They didn't have a binary release at the time because getting that to work would be even harder.
- mmjaa 9y agoFortunately, the ethos has persisted, and probably will for as long as computers are useful for us, socially and otherwise. Its very easy to have a fully open source computing environment, easier than ever in fact ..
- astrodust 9y agoYes and no. The things we need to have open-source, like voting machines, automotive control systems and such, are extremely closed.