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