SoylentNews

canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Tuesday at OSCON, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has continued the celebration of 20 years of open source [opensource.org]. 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.

Original Submission