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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Christine Peterson finally publishes her account of the day that the term "open source software" was coined, 20 years ago.
In a few days, on February 3, the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the term "open source software" is upon us. As open source software grows in popularity and powers some of the most robust and important innovations of our time, we reflect on its rise to prominence.
I am the originator of the term "open source software" and came up with it while executive director at Foresight Institute. Not a software developer like the rest, I thank Linux programmer Todd Anderson for supporting the term and proposing it to the group.
This is my account of how I came up with it, how it was proposed, and the subsequent reactions. Of course, there are a number of accounts of the coining of the term, for example by Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman, yet this is mine, written on January 2, 2006.
The article is not going to change the world, but it is an interesting piece of history that many in our community will find interesting.
Source: https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:46PM (4 children)
Back then, many software were distributed on tapes in source format, and the sysadmins will compile and install them on their system. The phrase "open source software" would have been like "h2o water".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Friday February 02 2018, @12:00AM (2 children)
Binaries were not considered software, and for many of us still are not.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @08:52AM (1 child)
so what do you call "binaries" then? I'm honestly curious, not trying to be argumentative.
I thought "hardware" refers to the machine, and "software" refers to a list of actions that the machine should execute.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 02 2018, @07:29PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by donkeyhotay on Friday February 02 2018, @04:00PM
That's right, and that's why I had a similar, kind of puzzled reaction when I first heard about "open source" software back around 1998 or so. I wasn't in the Unix world, but the IBM mainframe/mini computer world was the same, i.e., when you bought software the source code was included. Everyone wanted the source code so that they could modify it to fit their business. It was just understood that when you bought software, you got the source code. This was the norm when a lot of companies only had one computer on premises (a mini or mainframe) and lots of terminals. Software only started getting "closed" when PCs started showing up on everyone's desk.
This is also a very odd way of going about claiming credit for coining a phrase. Most linguists and etymologists turn to the first *written* use of a word or phrase to determine origin. To just come out and say, "I invented it" at some meeting is a little weird. It would help if there were some corroboration of the story. Otherwise you just come of sounding like Lord Mountbatten relating all of the amazing things you did "during the war." Yawn.