This is absolutely not true. Stallman was in the group of people Cced on the email that day to get their support for using the newly-invented term "open source". He took longer than most to respond, and when he did, he responded negatively (and fairly aggressively, as I recall). But many long-time supporters of the FSF in that email discussion were totally in favor of the proposal, and it came as a surprise to me that Stallman wasn't.
I believe you. But it's not a stretch to say that "open source" was coined to mean something different than "free software" and it could be a proverbial hill to die on, ideologically.
The term “Open Source” was coined by Christine Peterson in the context of a discussion about a source available project which did not meet RMS’ viral conditions for “free software.” Peterson suggested “open source” as an alternative phrase, and it spread from there.
This is incorrect almost from beginning to end. "Open source" was specifically coined to describe the same set of licenses described by "free software", and the OSD is a slightly edited version of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The only correct statement in your comment is that Chris Peterson coined the phrase.
RMS never included copyleft in the requirements of the free software definition. <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> lists many non-copyleft licenses as legitimate free-software licenses.
1. Free software doesn't imply virality.
2. Open source is defined to mean exactly what free software means, but without using the word free. The difference in the definitions is due to the perspective used: freedoms of the user vs restrictions the license imposes.
That was sloppy of me. Thank you for the correction. What I meant was that RMS advocates for “free as in [user] freedom,” whereas others wanted a word that just meant “free as in beer” unencumbered by all the other freedom-maintaining restrictions. Peterson offered “open source” and Eric Raymond ran with it.
This comment is also incorrect almost from beginning to end; "open source" has always required the same set of freedoms as "free software". The only correct statements in your comment are that Chris Peterson coined the phrase and that Eric Raymond took the lead in its further promotion.
Your claim is made dubious by the fact that there exist OSI-approved open source licenses (e.g. BSD) which the FSF says do not qualify as free software licenses.
You say, "Your claim is made dubious by the fact that there exist OSI-approved open source licenses (e.g. BSD) which the FSF says do not qualify as free software licenses." But you are lying: all the BSD licenses are listed on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html as free software licenses. That page was already linked to in a reply to you 15 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfish8
There have been some cases of disagreement in the past between the FSF and OSI, where they differed on how to interpret a license. None of these were major licenses like the BSD license; they were minor disagreements that were quickly resolved, generally by updating the license to eliminate the ambiguity that was the cause of the disagreement.
Your claims are made dubious by your repeated posting of supporting claims that are easily shown to be completely false, including by material you have already been referred to in this very same thread.
Much of the reason the term "open source" started was to get rid of the "free beer" connotation that "free software" had. They thought companies were scared the word "free" meant they couldn't profit.
Free software is coterminous with open source: the source is freely available for anyone to use and modify.
The Stallmanism for "viral" software is copylefted software. Stallman would recommend you copyleft your software, but you don't need to in order for it to be considered free software.
The only thing that's _clear_ is that, despite a handful of likeminded folks perennially floating this claim here and being challenged on it, evidence overwhelmingly shows that the term "open source" was minted in 1998 exactly the way history says it was, and that some people on the wrong side of hubris and/or the Mandela effect refuse to accept it. It's like the software world's very own strain of truther conspiracy.
What _has_ been shown is that there exists a document predating 1998 in which the words "open" and "source" are incidentally adjacent—in a completely different grammatical context. It is telling, now just as it was the last time, that this slippery document (which has been perniciously retitled, no less) is The One that is always held up as proof—instead of a representative sample of the, you know, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of examples showing "open source" in casual use that would be expected to exist if the claim actually held any water.
> Linus's [and the BSDs'] disagreement with RMS's ideology is well
known, so if "open source" were really already a thing before 1998, then we
should expect that the number of times "open source" appears among his cohort
prior to 1998 would be [...] as common as it is today. For it not
to show up before that point and then to explode in use post-mozilla.org[...]
Do you want to approach this systematically, or do you want to string together a series of continually evasive comments? The sentence you've just quoted comes from your second link, not your first, which is what marwis was addressing, which itself means your "reply" here can in no way be construed as actually responding to his or her point.
Either source is fair play, of course, but it would be a waste of time for anyone to engage, as an attempt to prosecute any of your claims, without some kind of indicator that you're not just going to abandon the pretext for the current line of inquiry at any given moment and try to hop to another branch.
Every time I run into someone trying this trick, it reminds me of a Scott Aaronson post about people who are either incapable or unwilling to subject their "side" of an issue to logical deduction:
> What fascinated me was that, with every single issue we discussed, we went around in a similar circle — and Kurt didn’t seem to see any problem with this, just so long as the number of 2SAT clauses that he had to resolve to get a contradiction was large enough. [...] Inspired by conversations with Kurt and others, I hereby wish to propose a different theory of fundamentalist psychology. My theory is this: fundamentalists use a system of logical inference wherein you only have to apply the inference rules two or three times before you stop. (The exact number of inferences can vary, depending on how much you like the conclusion.)
I provided a counter example that shows they didn't.
That's not enough, and you claimed the example was the only one in existence, so I provided a second, which must have been a surprise to you!
Both use 'open source' in a similar context. One even capitalises it as a proper noun and presents it as a movement people should get behind.
What is your argument at this point? Both authors of those emails are time travellers or something? Do you think someone is fabricating these emails? Why would they do that and how would they get them onto these third-party websites?
> What is your argument at this point? Both authors of those emails are time travellers or something?
You know it's not.
> Do you think someone is fabricating these emails? Why would they do that and how would they get them onto these third-party websites?
Once again: any attempt to engage requires as a precondition some kind of indicator that doing so wouldn't be a monumental waste of time. You seem comfortable providing assurance that such a thing will remain forever absent.
> any attempt to engage requires as a precondition some kind of indicator that doing so wouldn't be a monumental waste of Tim
Since you are engaging by replying, you must have some kind of indicator? You chose to reply in the first place and to keep replying.
And you said you were only aware of one example, so you must be rapidly re-examining your own position, right?
We can restart the conversation if you like? What do you think is wrong with my multiple examples of the use of the term, in context, before they claimed to have coined it? Why don't they count in your mind?
There's an implicit "further"—as in "engage further"—and an explicit "to prosecute any of your claims". It's clear enough what type of "engaging" I'm referring to.
What fascinated me was that, even laying out my awareness of the "neverending fractal of bullshit" tactic and making it clear it wouldn't work, we went around in a similar circle — and Chris didn't seem to see any problem with this, just so long as he thought that even if you couldn't be fooled into wasting your time addressing his claims on the original topic under the mistaken belief that he was coming to the table in good faith, he might stand a chance fooling you into wasting time arguing about why you weren't willing to waste time arguing with him.
It's not a 'neverending fractal of bullshit' - it's two emails showing that the term was used before they claimed to have coined it. I showed a second after you complained it was just one. Are they bullshit? Why? I'm not going in in a circle - I'm still pointing at these two examples you haven't explained yet.
At the moment you've just entered a conversation, said you don't agree, then refused to explain why when asked, and complained that you'd be a fool to reply. Why get involved in the first place when you don't have any arugments to offer?
Sorry, I replied to the wrong thread. The example use of Open Source in that NT thread above is actually rather convincing. Seems like it existed for a while just wasn't in common use. Indeed '98 as the inception date seems a bit late to me.
If you carefully read the email you linked you'll see the context is different and open source (and definitely not open source software) is not used as a term on its own.
Yes the term didn't have exactly the same meaning, but that's sort of the point. The term Open Source, as a term related to software code access, predated the OSI and Peterson. They took an existing term which other people were already using, claimed it for their own, and started trying to tell people how to use it. They even tried to trademark it!
It's true that the words "open" and "source" were occasionally combined previously to express a variety of different concepts related to software, and the term "open source" as such also existed to describe a kind of "intelligence information" that was drawn entirely from open sources like newspapers rather than closed sources like wiretaps. But that's entirely different from the term being in usage with a well-defined meaning.
In this particular case, it's relevant that OpenDOS was never "open source" in the sense coined by Chris Peterson. Caldera was trying to see if they could get the benefits of free software without paying the costs (loss of control and revenue) by making DR-DOS what we would now call "source available", so they promoted what they called an "open source code model". This phrase doesn't make sense if you parse it as "open-source code-model"; there's no such thing as a "code model" in any context related to software. Rather, they intended it to parse as "open source-code model". So "open source" wasn't even a phrase in this case until Adam shortened "open source code" to "open source" for the subject of his email.
Caldera's attempt to promote the idea of an open source-code model, as distinct from "free software", failed, though I probably did download a copy of OpenDOS at the time. People didn't go around talking about the advantages and disadvantages of "open source" or even the "open source-code model". It just wasn't a thing.
Later in the thread, you point out https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.wi..., from 01993, three years earlier, where one Jerome Schneider says, "Open Source is best for everyone in the
long run," but is not talking about a social movement, just about source code being open (in the sense of published) rather than secret. None of the six replies refer to "open source", and apparently nobody used the term for three years, at which point it occurred as the grammatical adjacency coincidence you're pointing at, and then apparently nobody used it for two more years.
The OSI did not coin "open source", as the OSI didn't exist at the time; Chris Peterson did, in a meeting of free-software people who were trying to figure out how to persuade more companies to do what Netscape was doing and release their software as free software. The next day, Eric Raymond sent out the email I mentioned, and updated his home page to replace "free software" with "open source". That's the day the term came into existence. I think it took a few weeks to hammer out the OSD and organize the OSI.
I was on the fsb ("free software business") mailing list at the time, where we constantly talked about the issues of how to build businesses on free software. (Maybe that's why Eric Cced me on the email; I certainly wasn't the same kind of luminary as the other people on the list.) The term "open source" just wasn't a term that we were using. Debian wasn't using the term. On FoRK we weren't using the term --- I wasn't on FoRK in 01996 but I was in 01998 http://web.archive.org/web/20080517045124/http://xent.com/Fo....
It's true that if you go looking through a large enough corpus of historical documents looking for a coincidence of two common words, you will find occurrences. There are occurrences of the term "internetted" documented from 01874, for example. It's surprising that in the 25 years of Usenet and mailing lists prior to 01998 you've only been able to find two coincidences out of the hundreds of millions of public messages posted by tens of millions of people; surely there are five or six more in there at least.
I'm answering you at such length in part because I've seen you to be a reasonable person at times in the past; I did read your dissertation, after all, and learned some things from it.
Please don't disappoint me by continuing to advocate the same clearly false position. You have enough information now that persisting in your error would amount to reckless disregard for the truth, and therefore malicious slander against the people whose reputations your falsehoods tend to damage.
As I like to say it, in Lisp terms open source and free software are EQUAL but not EQ. That is, they are defined to mean the same thing but have different underlying reasoning.
Open source really is just free software with sexier marketing. ESR and RMS were close friends, once, before RMS went full CWC. Based on ESR's blog posts I would guess his perspective to be that yes, proprietary software is inherently evil, but you can't say that if you want to win hearts and minds in the real world. You have to talk up the practical, bottom line advantages: how is releasing the source code under a liberal license going to contribute value to our company and to society at large? And how can you make money while doing this? That will get the ear of mainstream society, especially decision makers in government and business. Not Stallman's wear sackcloth, eat bugs, and cry into the wilderness approach.
The Eric Conspiracy's plan worked a little too well, and thanks to sexy marketing corporations have embraced open source and now have a vast library of code with which to do nefarious things unheard of in the era when Microsoft was the evil empire.
Exactly. I have nothing against RMS, but in my eyes he is just a typical leftie person - makes up an own definition of something, and then runs around a tries to convince everyone that his definition is the only correct one and the term must mean exactly what he claims it means.
Since he made up not only "an own definition" but pretty much the whole idea and concept of Free Software, I'd say that yes, the term actually does mean exactly what he says it means and nothing else.
