The history of term ‘open source’

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software

On February 3, is the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the term “open source software. This article tells the story how this term started to replace term “free software”.

3 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mozilla’s radical open-source move helped rewrite rules of tech
    https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-open-source-firefox-move-helped-rewrite-tech-rules-anniversary/

    A gamble 20 years ago unleashed the source code for the browser that became Firefox. The approach is now core to Facebook, Google and everyone else.

    Twenty years ago, Netscape Communications was desperate. It was the darling of the first wave of internet companies for its ability to let you surf the web, but Microsoft had crushed its business prospects by giving away a web browser for free.

    So Netscape did something that was radical for the time: On March 31, 1998, it gave away the source code behind its Netscape Communicator browser, the once-secret programming instructions that developers used to build the software. The project, called Mozilla

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    In the spirit of open government, France dumps 9,067 repos online to show off its FOSS credentials https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/11/french_government_foss/

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    TIME TILL OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE
    https://staltz.com/time-till-open-source-alternative.html

    Open source is coming for your business. It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to your software. It won’t happen overnight, it will start out as a poor alternative, but slowly growing to become the robust and cheap (in fact, free!) solution that everyone uses.

    In this blog post, I’ll prove this to you with data. I present a measurement I call “Time Till Open Source Alternative” (TTOSA) which represents how long a proprietary software lasted without a direct open source alternative.

    Reply

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