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Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of Open Source

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the here's-to-many-more dept.

canopic jug writes:

Tuesday at OSCON, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has continued the celebration of 20 years of open source. A blog post at the OSI reflects on how Open Source fits in with pre-existing intitiatives.

Open source did not emerge from a void. It was consciously a marketing programme for the already-15-year-old idea of free software and arose in the context of both the GNU Project and the BSD community and their history (stretching back to the late 70s). We chose to reflect this in the agenda for our celebration track at OSCON.

But that doesn't mean its inception is irrelevant. The consensus to define open source at the VA Linux meeting and the subsequent formation of OSI and acceptance of the Open Source Definition changed the phrase from descriptive to a term of art accepted globally. It created a movement and a market and consequently spread software freedom far beyond anyone's expectations. That has to be worth celebrating.

Wikipedia's entry on Open Source provides a great deal of information on its origin and application in multiple fields besides just software.

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:59PM (2 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:59PM (#709031) Homepage Journal

    This according to Richard himself: "If there is no explicit license it defaults to All Rights Reserved".

    To provide your code for download on your own website implies that your user has a license to download and use it but DOES NOT imply that they have a license to redistribute it - even if they don't patch it.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 18 2018, @11:18PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday July 18 2018, @11:18PM (#709077) Journal

    To provide your code for download on your own website implies that your user has a license to download and use it

    Strictly speaking it only implies that you are allowed to download it. I'd also say it implies the license to look at it. But unless explicitly specified, you cannot even imply the license to compile it, let alone use it for some specific purpose.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 19 2018, @12:49AM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 19 2018, @12:49AM (#709111) Journal

    You're stating my problem with No License.

    I may (questionably) be able to download it. But I have NO rights to do ANYTHING with it. So why even download it.

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