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> 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 ma
by 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.