[sldev] What's Open Source? the SL viewer is, for one.

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 30-Aug-2007, at 13:24, Dzonatas wrote:
> Open Source did start way before it ever got applied to software, yes.

I'm not talking about anything but software. I'm not talking about  
some unrelated use of the term in the intelligence community. And  
whether Eric Raymond had ever heard of that use of the term before he  
came up with "Open Source" as a counterpoint to the FSF's hijacking  
the term "Free Software" is irrelevant... the use of the term as Eric  
promoted it is not related to inter-agency cooperation. It's never  
been seen as anything but a straightforward extension of the meaning  
of Open in the term "Open Systems".

Open source *software*. Published without restrictions over how it  
should be distributed or modified, some in the public domain, some  
under licenses that were very close to public domain, some under more  
complex ones that led to the GPL and the BSDL and the MIT and Apache  
licenses and all the rest. Published in technical journals, in books,  
on academic distribution tapes, in hobbyist magazines, and by user  
groups. Software like Ron Cain's Small C compiler, like Software  
Tools, like Tiny Basic and Tiny Pascal, like the DECUS tapes and FIG  
Forth. This was all "Open Source" in the current sense. Long before  
RMS and ESR and the rest came in to draw battle lines between the FSF  
and those of us who just wanted to see good code out there.