[common; also adj. open-source] Term coined in March 1998 following
the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under
licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and
redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the
hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by
avoiding the negative connotations (to {suit}s) of the term "{free
software}". For discussion of the follow-on tactics and their
consequences, see the Open Source Initiative site.
Five years after this term was invented, in 2003, it is worth noting
the huge shift in assumptions it helped bring about, if only because
the hacker culture's collective memory of what went before is in some
ways blurring. Hackers have so completely refocused themselves around
the idea and ideal of open source that we are beginning to forget
that we used to do most of our work in closed-source environments.
Until the late 1990s open source was a sporadic exception that
usually had to live on top of a closed-source operating system and
alongside closed-source tools; entire open-source environments like
{Linux} and the *BSD systems didn't even exist in a usable form until
around 1993 and weren't taken very seriously by anyone but a
pioneering few until about five years later.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {bazaar}{free software}{freeware}{FRS}{FUD wars}{GandhiCon}{IBM}{OSS}{point release}{Unix}]