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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:53AM (1 child)
No wonder so many men seem to instantly grasp the issue here!
Let me make a boy analogy.
- Knowing a program is free software is like knowing a guy doesn't have antiquated beliefs about women.
- The open source brand is like that reactionary friend you once thought was merely trolling (because how could a woman ever think about herself in such a way?) who sees no reason other women--not just her herself--should have lives independent of men.
- Proprietary software is like being married to a violent and abusive rapist with 19th century ideas about women.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:17PM
we should have a -1 No Sense of Humor mod