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The term “Open Source” was coined by Christine Peterson in the context of a discussion about a source available project which did not meet RMS’ viral conditions

The term “Open Source” was coined by Christine Peterson in the context of a discussion about a source available project which did not meet RMS’ viral conditions for “free software.” Peterson suggested “open source” as an alternative phrase, and it spread from there.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> The term “Open Source” was coined by Christine Peterson I think this has been shown to be something of a myth. The term clearly predates when she claims to have coined it. http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html
- andrewshadura 5y ago
  If you carefully read the email you linked you'll see the context is different and open source (and definitely not open source software) is not used as a term on its own.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Yes the term didn't have exactly the same meaning, but that's sort of the point. The term Open Source, as a term related to software code access, predated the OSI and Peterson. They took an existing term which other people were already using, claimed it for their own, and started trying to tell people how to use it. They even tried to trademark it!
- cxr 5y ago
  > this has been shown to be something of a myth No, it hasn't. The only thing that's _clear_ is that, despite a handful of likeminded folks perennially floating this claim here and being challenged on it, evidence overwhelmingly shows that the term "open source" was minted in 1998 exactly the way history says it was, and that some people on the wrong side of hubris and/or the Mandela effect refuse to accept it. It's like the software world's very own strain of truther conspiracy. What _has_ been shown is that there exists a document predating 1998 in which the words "open" and "source" are incidentally adjacent—in a completely different grammatical context. It is telling, now just as it was the last time, that this slippery document (which has been perniciously retitled, no less) is The One that is always held up as proof—instead of a representative sample of the, you know, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of examples showing "open source" in casual use that would be expected to exist if the claim actually held any water. > Linus's [and the BSDs'] disagreement with RMS's ideology is well known, so if "open source" were really already a thing before 1998, then we should expect that the number of times "open source" appears among his cohort prior to 1998 would be [...] as common as it is today. For it not to show up before that point and then to explode in use post-mozilla.org[...]
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > incidentally adjacent I don't think that's an honest description of what's in that email. It says: > Caldera believes an open source code model benefits the industry in many ways So they're already using the phrase 'open source' as a compound adjective. > The One that is always held up as proof Well it's not just one email. For example here's another, from 1993: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32/c/WoBvPB0U9Co/m/wXfpq5nEJTYJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.wi... It uses the term with the same meaning: > Open Source is best for everyone in the long run.
    - marwis 5y ago
      To me it reads more like (open (source code)) which feels very distinct from ((open source) code).
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > Open Source is best for everyone in the long run. It's literally written as a proper noun!
        cxr 5y ago
        Do you want to approach this systematically, or do you want to string together a series of continually evasive comments? The sentence you've just quoted comes from your second link, not your first, which is what marwis was addressing, which itself means your "reply" here can in no way be construed as actually responding to his or her point. Either source is fair play, of course, but it would be a waste of time for anyone to engage, as an attempt to prosecute any of your claims, without some kind of indicator that you're not just going to abandon the pretext for the current line of inquiry at any given moment and try to hop to another branch. Every time I run into someone trying this trick, it reminds me of a Scott Aaronson post about people who are either incapable or unwilling to subject their "side" of an issue to logical deduction: > What fascinated me was that, with every single issue we discussed, we went around in a similar circle — and Kurt didn’t seem to see any problem with this, just so long as the number of 2SAT clauses that he had to resolve to get a contradiction was large enough. [...] Inspired by conversations with Kurt and others, I hereby wish to propose a different theory of fundamentalist psychology. My theory is this: fundamentalists use a system of logical inference wherein you only have to apply the inference rules two or three times before you stop. (The exact number of inferences can vary, depending on how much you like the conclusion.) <https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=232 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=232>
- kragen 5y ago
  This is not correct. It's true that the words "open" and "source" were occasionally combined previously to express a variety of different concepts related to software, and the term "open source" as such also existed to describe a kind of "intelligence information" that was drawn entirely from open sources like newspapers rather than closed sources like wiretaps. But that's entirely different from the term being in usage with a well-defined meaning. In this particular case, it's relevant that OpenDOS was never "open source" in the sense coined by Chris Peterson. Caldera was trying to see if they could get the benefits of free software without paying the costs (loss of control and revenue) by making DR-DOS what we would now call "source available", so they promoted what they called an "open source code model". This phrase doesn't make sense if you parse it as "open-source code-model"; there's no such thing as a "code model" in any context related to software. Rather, they intended it to parse as "open source-code model". So "open source" wasn't even a phrase in this case until Adam shortened "open source code" to "open source" for the subject of his email. Caldera's attempt to promote the idea of an open source-code model, as distinct from "free software", failed, though I probably did download a copy of OpenDOS at the time. People didn't go around talking about the advantages and disadvantages of "open source" or even the "open source-code model". It just wasn't a thing. Later in the thread, you point out https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32/c/WoBvPB0U9Co/m/wXfpq5nEJTYJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.wi..., from 01993, three years earlier, where one Jerome Schneider says, "Open Source is best for everyone in the long run," but is not talking about a social movement, just about source code being open (in the sense of published) rather than secret. None of the six replies refer to "open source", and apparently nobody used the term for three years, at which point it occurred as the grammatical adjacency coincidence you're pointing at, and then apparently nobody used it for two more years. The OSI did not coin "open source", as the OSI didn't exist at the time; Chris Peterson did, in a meeting of free-software people who were trying to figure out how to persuade more companies to do what Netscape was doing and release their software as free software. The next day, Eric Raymond sent out the email I mentioned, and updated his home page to replace "free software" with "open source". That's the day the term came into existence. I think it took a few weeks to hammer out the OSD and organize the OSI. I was on the fsb ("free software business") mailing list at the time, where we constantly talked about the issues of how to build businesses on free software. (Maybe that's why Eric Cced me on the email; I certainly wasn't the same kind of luminary as the other people on the list.) The term "open source" just wasn't a term that we were using. Debian wasn't using the term. On FoRK we weren't using the term --- I wasn't on FoRK in 01996 but I was in 01998 http://web.archive.org/web/20080517045124/http://xent.com/FoRK-archive/nov98/0340.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080517045124/http://xent.com/Fo.... It's true that if you go looking through a large enough corpus of historical documents looking for a coincidence of two common words, you will find occurrences. There are occurrences of the term "internetted" documented from 01874, for example. It's surprising that in the 25 years of Usenet and mailing lists prior to 01998 you've only been able to find two coincidences out of the hundreds of millions of public messages posted by tens of millions of people; surely there are five or six more in there at least. I'm answering you at such length in part because I've seen you to be a reasonable person at times in the past; I did read your dissertation, after all, and learned some things from it. Please don't disappoint me by continuing to advocate the same clearly false position. You have enough information now that persisting in your error would amount to reckless disregard for the truth, and therefore malicious slander against the people whose reputations your falsehoods tend to damage.
bitwize 5y ago
No. Free software is coterminous with open source: the source is freely available for anyone to use and modify. The Stallmanism for "viral" software is copylefted software. Stallman would recommend you copyleft your software, but you don't need to in order for it to be considered free software.
andrewshadura 5y ago
1. Free software doesn't imply virality. 2. Open source is defined to mean exactly what free software means, but without using the word free. The difference in the definitions is due to the perspective used: freedoms of the user vs restrictions the license imposes.
- garmaine 5y ago
  That was sloppy of me. Thank you for the correction. What I meant was that RMS advocates for “free as in [user] freedom,” whereas others wanted a word that just meant “free as in beer” unencumbered by all the other freedom-maintaining restrictions. Peterson offered “open source” and Eric Raymond ran with it.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Much of the reason the term "open source" started was to get rid of the "free beer" connotation that "free software" had. They thought companies were scared the word "free" meant they couldn't profit.
  - kragen 5y ago
    This comment is also incorrect almost from beginning to end; "open source" has always required the same set of freedoms as "free software". The only correct statements in your comment are that Chris Peterson coined the phrase and that Eric Raymond took the lead in its further promotion.
    - garmaine 5y ago
      Your claim is made dubious by the fact that there exist OSI-approved open source licenses (e.g. BSD) which the FSF says do not qualify as free software licenses.
      - kragen 5y ago
        You say, "Your claim is made dubious by the fact that there exist OSI-approved open source licenses (e.g. BSD) which the FSF says do not qualify as free software licenses." But you are lying: all the BSD licenses are listed on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html as free software licenses. That page was already linked to in a reply to you 15 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfish8 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfish8 There have been some cases of disagreement in the past between the FSF and OSI, where they differed on how to interpret a license. None of these were major licenses like the BSD license; they were minor disagreements that were quickly resolved, generally by updating the license to eliminate the ambiguity that was the cause of the disagreement. Your claims are made dubious by your repeated posting of supporting claims that are easily shown to be completely false, including by material you have already been referred to in this very same thread.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
RMS never included copyleft in the requirements of the free software definition. <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> lists many non-copyleft licenses as legitimate free-software licenses.
kragen 5y ago
This is incorrect almost from beginning to end. "Open source" was specifically coined to describe the same set of licenses described by "free software", and the OSD is a slightly edited version of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The only correct statement in your comment is that Chris Peterson coined the phrase.
- EarlKing 5y ago
  Except that she didn't, and this is well documented by Martin Tournoij[1]. Caldera OpenDOS preceded her coinage along with a dozen others. [1] https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html

chrisseaton 5y ago

> The term “Open Source” was coined by Christine Peterson I think this has been shown to be something of a myth. The term clearly predates when she claims to have coined it. http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html

andrewshadura 5y ago
If you carefully read the email you linked you'll see the context is different and open source (and definitely not open source software) is not used as a term on its own.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Yes the term didn't have exactly the same meaning, but that's sort of the point. The term Open Source, as a term related to software code access, predated the OSI and Peterson. They took an existing term which other people were already using, claimed it for their own, and started trying to tell people how to use it. They even tried to trademark it!
cxr 5y ago
> this has been shown to be something of a myth No, it hasn't. The only thing that's _clear_ is that, despite a handful of likeminded folks perennially floating this claim here and being challenged on it, evidence overwhelmingly shows that the term "open source" was minted in 1998 exactly the way history says it was, and that some people on the wrong side of hubris and/or the Mandela effect refuse to accept it. It's like the software world's very own strain of truther conspiracy. What _has_ been shown is that there exists a document predating 1998 in which the words "open" and "source" are incidentally adjacent—in a completely different grammatical context. It is telling, now just as it was the last time, that this slippery document (which has been perniciously retitled, no less) is The One that is always held up as proof—instead of a representative sample of the, you know, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of examples showing "open source" in casual use that would be expected to exist if the claim actually held any water. > Linus's [and the BSDs'] disagreement with RMS's ideology is well known, so if "open source" were really already a thing before 1998, then we should expect that the number of times "open source" appears among his cohort prior to 1998 would be [...] as common as it is today. For it not to show up before that point and then to explode in use post-mozilla.org[...]
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > incidentally adjacent I don't think that's an honest description of what's in that email. It says: > Caldera believes an open source code model benefits the industry in many ways So they're already using the phrase 'open source' as a compound adjective. > The One that is always held up as proof Well it's not just one email. For example here's another, from 1993: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32/c/WoBvPB0U9Co/m/wXfpq5nEJTYJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.wi... It uses the term with the same meaning: > Open Source is best for everyone in the long run.
  - marwis 5y ago
    To me it reads more like (open (source code)) which feels very distinct from ((open source) code).
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > Open Source is best for everyone in the long run. It's literally written as a proper noun!
      - cxr 5y ago
        Do you want to approach this systematically, or do you want to string together a series of continually evasive comments? The sentence you've just quoted comes from your second link, not your first, which is what marwis was addressing, which itself means your "reply" here can in no way be construed as actually responding to his or her point. Either source is fair play, of course, but it would be a waste of time for anyone to engage, as an attempt to prosecute any of your claims, without some kind of indicator that you're not just going to abandon the pretext for the current line of inquiry at any given moment and try to hop to another branch. Every time I run into someone trying this trick, it reminds me of a Scott Aaronson post about people who are either incapable or unwilling to subject their "side" of an issue to logical deduction: > What fascinated me was that, with every single issue we discussed, we went around in a similar circle — and Kurt didn’t seem to see any problem with this, just so long as the number of 2SAT clauses that he had to resolve to get a contradiction was large enough. [...] Inspired by conversations with Kurt and others, I hereby wish to propose a different theory of fundamentalist psychology. My theory is this: fundamentalists use a system of logical inference wherein you only have to apply the inference rules two or three times before you stop. (The exact number of inferences can vary, depending on how much you like the conclusion.) <https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=232 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=232>
kragen 5y ago
This is not correct. It's true that the words "open" and "source" were occasionally combined previously to express a variety of different concepts related to software, and the term "open source" as such also existed to describe a kind of "intelligence information" that was drawn entirely from open sources like newspapers rather than closed sources like wiretaps. But that's entirely different from the term being in usage with a well-defined meaning. In this particular case, it's relevant that OpenDOS was never "open source" in the sense coined by Chris Peterson. Caldera was trying to see if they could get the benefits of free software without paying the costs (loss of control and revenue) by making DR-DOS what we would now call "source available", so they promoted what they called an "open source code model". This phrase doesn't make sense if you parse it as "open-source code-model"; there's no such thing as a "code model" in any context related to software. Rather, they intended it to parse as "open source-code model". So "open source" wasn't even a phrase in this case until Adam shortened "open source code" to "open source" for the subject of his email. Caldera's attempt to promote the idea of an open source-code model, as distinct from "free software", failed, though I probably did download a copy of OpenDOS at the time. People didn't go around talking about the advantages and disadvantages of "open source" or even the "open source-code model". It just wasn't a thing. Later in the thread, you point out https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32/c/WoBvPB0U9Co/m/wXfpq5nEJTYJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.wi..., from 01993, three years earlier, where one Jerome Schneider says, "Open Source is best for everyone in the long run," but is not talking about a social movement, just about source code being open (in the sense of published) rather than secret. None of the six replies refer to "open source", and apparently nobody used the term for three years, at which point it occurred as the grammatical adjacency coincidence you're pointing at, and then apparently nobody used it for two more years. The OSI did not coin "open source", as the OSI didn't exist at the time; Chris Peterson did, in a meeting of free-software people who were trying to figure out how to persuade more companies to do what Netscape was doing and release their software as free software. The next day, Eric Raymond sent out the email I mentioned, and updated his home page to replace "free software" with "open source". That's the day the term came into existence. I think it took a few weeks to hammer out the OSD and organize the OSI. I was on the fsb ("free software business") mailing list at the time, where we constantly talked about the issues of how to build businesses on free software. (Maybe that's why Eric Cced me on the email; I certainly wasn't the same kind of luminary as the other people on the list.) The term "open source" just wasn't a term that we were using. Debian wasn't using the term. On FoRK we weren't using the term --- I wasn't on FoRK in 01996 but I was in 01998 http://web.archive.org/web/20080517045124/http://xent.com/FoRK-archive/nov98/0340.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080517045124/http://xent.com/Fo.... It's true that if you go looking through a large enough corpus of historical documents looking for a coincidence of two common words, you will find occurrences. There are occurrences of the term "internetted" documented from 01874, for example. It's surprising that in the 25 years of Usenet and mailing lists prior to 01998 you've only been able to find two coincidences out of the hundreds of millions of public messages posted by tens of millions of people; surely there are five or six more in there at least. I'm answering you at such length in part because I've seen you to be a reasonable person at times in the past; I did read your dissertation, after all, and learned some things from it. Please don't disappoint me by continuing to advocate the same clearly false position. You have enough information now that persisting in your error would amount to reckless disregard for the truth, and therefore malicious slander against the people whose reputations your falsehoods tend to damage.

bitwize 5y ago

No. Free software is coterminous with open source: the source is freely available for anyone to use and modify. The Stallmanism for "viral" software is copylefted software. Stallman would recommend you copyleft your software, but you don't need to in order for it to be considered free software.

andrewshadura 5y ago

1. Free software doesn't imply virality. 2. Open source is defined to mean exactly what free software means, but without using the word free. The difference in the definitions is due to the perspective used: freedoms of the user vs restrictions the license imposes.

garmaine 5y ago
That was sloppy of me. Thank you for the correction. What I meant was that RMS advocates for “free as in [user] freedom,” whereas others wanted a word that just meant “free as in beer” unencumbered by all the other freedom-maintaining restrictions. Peterson offered “open source” and Eric Raymond ran with it.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Much of the reason the term "open source" started was to get rid of the "free beer" connotation that "free software" had. They thought companies were scared the word "free" meant they couldn't profit.
- kragen 5y ago
  This comment is also incorrect almost from beginning to end; "open source" has always required the same set of freedoms as "free software". The only correct statements in your comment are that Chris Peterson coined the phrase and that Eric Raymond took the lead in its further promotion.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    Your claim is made dubious by the fact that there exist OSI-approved open source licenses (e.g. BSD) which the FSF says do not qualify as free software licenses.
    - kragen 5y ago
      You say, "Your claim is made dubious by the fact that there exist OSI-approved open source licenses (e.g. BSD) which the FSF says do not qualify as free software licenses." But you are lying: all the BSD licenses are listed on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html as free software licenses. That page was already linked to in a reply to you 15 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfish8 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfish8 There have been some cases of disagreement in the past between the FSF and OSI, where they differed on how to interpret a license. None of these were major licenses like the BSD license; they were minor disagreements that were quickly resolved, generally by updating the license to eliminate the ambiguity that was the cause of the disagreement. Your claims are made dubious by your repeated posting of supporting claims that are easily shown to be completely false, including by material you have already been referred to in this very same thread.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

RMS never included copyleft in the requirements of the free software definition. <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> lists many non-copyleft licenses as legitimate free-software licenses.

kragen 5y ago

This is incorrect almost from beginning to end. "Open source" was specifically coined to describe the same set of licenses described by "free software", and the OSD is a slightly edited version of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The only correct statement in your comment is that Chris Peterson coined the phrase.

EarlKing 5y ago
Except that she didn't, and this is well documented by Martin Tournoij[1]. Caldera OpenDOS preceded her coinage along with a dozen others. [1] https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html