2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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open source
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. [common; also adj. open-source ] Term coined in March 1998 following the
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Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses
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guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the
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code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software
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to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the negative connotations (to
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suit s) of the term free software. For discussion of the follow-on tactics
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and their consequences, see the Open Source Initiative site. Five years
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after this term was invented, in 2003, it is worth noting the huge shift in
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assumptions it helped bring about, if only because the hacker culture's
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collective memory of what went before is in some ways blurring. Hackers have
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so completely refocused themselves around the idea and ideal of open source
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that we are beginning to forget that we used to do most of our work in
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closed-source environments. Until the late 1990s open source was a sporadic
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exception that usually had to live on top of a closed-source operating
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system and alongside closed-source tools; entire open-source environments
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like Linux and the *BSD systems didn't even exist in a usable form until
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around 1993 and weren't taken very seriously by anyone but a pioneering few
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until about five years later.
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