open source

n. [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.

