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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 suits) 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.
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