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A Decade of OSS, 10 Years After the Summit 132

Posted by CmdrTaco from the has-it-been-that-long dept.
Jacob's ladder writes "Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit and founder of Electric Cloud was there, and notes how much the landscape has changed. 'When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world. By the time of the first O'Reilly conference, there were dozens; now there are probably thousands. Also, open-source software has received substantial mainstream acceptance. 10 years ago, people were suspicious or afraid of it; now it is widely embraced.'"
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A Decade of OSS, 10 Years After the Summit More

A Decade of OSS, 10 Years After the Summit

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  • Huge success (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moderatorrater ( 1095745 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:03AM (#22989718)
    Even without the acceptance of Linux on the desktop, there's no doubt that open source has been a ridiculously huge success since then. Equal acceptance (at least) as a server OS, it runs the majority of web servers and web scripting languages. Overall, a very successful life so far. I'm excited to see where it ends up ten years from now.

  • *Amazing* spinoffs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:18AM (#22989904)
    I'm a huge fan of OSS, but what I love even more are the spin-off movements, namely the open content [wikipedia.org] projects. Of those, the two I love most are Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (of course) and the just ramping-up Metagovernment [metagovernment.org] project. Together, these are in the process of completely transforming how human society operates.
    • You have noticed that Wikipedia is 'open', but not 'free', right? There have been numerous leaks, especially over at wikileaks.org, about the cabal of Wikileaks editors who fairly arbitrarily censor and edit content? It's been written about repeatedly, such as the article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/ [theregister.co.uk].

      This sort of thing is why I prefer 'free source' to 'open source'. We encounter internal politic and lobbying poisoning the well for developers and authors with different

  • I remember those days (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:22AM (#22989966) Journal
    There was also freeware, trialware, crippleware, shareware, talk of varying types of licenses, and anything you didn't pay for normally came with caveats that fall into the 'you get what you pay for' category. So, yes, there was a lot of suspicion about OSS because of all that it was competing with.

    That was even before MS had killed off all of its serious competitors.

    Then there was just MS and Windows developers. There were a few areas of competition but Windows was just a far cry above what DOS programs were doing at the time. Do you remember paradox? Qbase? WordPerfect? WordStar? Novell? 10Base5 ethernet?

    I'm quite glad that OSS has made it this far and one so much.

    • 10Base5? (Score:3, Informative)

      by camperdave ( 969942 )
      I think 10Base5 was pretty much on its deathbed when Microsoft appeared on the scene. The cable was thick and unwieldy to install. It was costly, as you needed active devices to connect to the cable. 10Base2 was a lot cheaper, and it offered the flexibility to re-wire a network. 10BaseT was cheaper still, and much more fault tolerant.
    • "OSS is ten years old" is a crock!

      Sure, back in the old days (1970s, 1980s) there was a lot of freeware, crippleware and abandonware but that's true today too. Buy a new Windows PC and it is packed with 30 day trial stuff like anti-virus, winzip etc.

      Back in the old days there was quite a bit of OSS too. But what was lacking was an effective mechanism to share the code and keep the changes together. Sure there were BBSs and uucp, but that's a far cry from having cvs servers etc over the internet.

  • List your project (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Foofoobar ( 318279 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:22AM (#22989982)
    Think it would be cool if every Slashdot reader listed the open source project they have released along with the Sourceforge, Freshmeat or or repo address. I for one haven't updated my project, PHPulse (a highly scalable lightweight MVC framework for PHP) or about a year even though I have code updates on my machine at home. Get busy helping corporate customers and forget the main project. http://code.google.com/p/phpulse/ [google.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

      Yay woot let's give ourselves some publicity for once! We don't do that often enough. Well except me cause I cunningly put the link to my main project in my signature..

      • Re:List your project (Score:4, Insightful)

        by argent ( 18001 ) <peter@NOsPAm.slashdot.2006.taronga.com> on Monday April 07, 2008 @12:38PM (#22991118) Homepage Journal
        Who turns on signatures?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by uniquename72 ( 1169497 )
        You also cunningly say exactly what your project DOES in a clearly worded sentence right there on the homepage:

        a program that analyses a sound file into a spectrogram and is able to synthesise this spectrogram, or any other user-created image, back into a sound.

        This makes your project a rare one indeed. Many times I've had a problem that needed to be solved and was told, "Project X can do that." So I go to Project X's Sourceforge page and there's ZERO information about what the program is or how it works. Documentation is far too hard to come by.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

          So I go to Project X's Sourceforge page and there's ZERO information about what the program is or how it works.

          Indeed. A lot of projects make the mistake to assume that people who come to their site already know what it's about and tend to give you the latest news about the project and let you have fun trying to deduce what it's all about from these news. I also quite like my Examples page for it shows quite directly what my project can do :-).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by argent ( 18001 )
            Yah, I get that problem a lot. I use my "project.sourceforge.net" page for the documentation. Sourceforge provides forums and news and bug trackers and so on and I don't see any point in duplicating that.

    • Re:List your project (Score:4, Informative)

      by UtucXul ( 658400 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:45AM (#22990282) Homepage
      Cool idea (although I'm more in the Free Software camp than the Open Source one, but what the hell, we can all be friends). Here's my stuff:
      ZEUS-MP [umd.edu] -- Not originally mine, but I've done a lot of work on it and released this version of an older parallel MHD code for astronomy.
      Misc. Free stuff [umd.edu] -- bunch of perl and python scripts along with some LaTeX macros (including one for making business cards).
      Sadly, with all the work trying to finish my dissertation these days I haven't updated anything in a while.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by argent ( 18001 )
      I recently put a couple of my own projects that I've been hosting for years and years on Sourceforge. It's all still available at http://scarydevil.com/~peter/sw/ [scarydevil.com] but I've moved the latest snapshots into CVS at Sourceforge.

      http://plugdaemon.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
      http://amberlist.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

      I've also spent an awful lot of time lately on Speedtables.

      http://speedtables.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
    • That's a nice idea -- everyone loves showing off :)

      Mine is VIPS [soton.ac.uk], an image processing system with a spreadsheet-like GUI targetting large images (images bigger than RAM) and multicore (it has a fancy automatic threading system).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by toby ( 759 ) *
      My GPL'd projects are here [telegraphics.com.au]:
      • Various Photoshop filters and file formats
      • Code for recursive subdivision of quadratic and cubic Bézier curves
      • Bugzilla quip database
      • PDP-8 and DG Nova assembler
      • Erlang demo web application (Tic-Tac-Toe)
      • Simple expression parser
      • Example code for Huffman compression
      • Photoshop plugin for ICO/favicon format (very popular)
      • Jabber bots such as Subversion commit notify
      • PDP-11 backend for retargetable lcc compiler
      • ATA(PI) driver software for Microchip PIC18 (PIO)
      • Photoshop PSD/P

    • My most recent stuff is at http://honeypot.net/project [honeypot.net].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jc42 ( 318812 )
      Think it would be cool if every Slashdot reader listed the open source project they have released along with the Sourceforge, Freshmeat or or repo address.

      Well, I would, but there's an annoying problem: I haven't been able to update the sourceforge copy of my project for a couple of years now. I just get incomprehensible error codes that neither I nor google seems to be able to find explanations for. Meanwhile, I occasionally get email from people who have picked up the code from SF, and talk about possi
      • I got into a mess like this and had to find my way through the sourceforge documentation on how to contact the administrators. Thats what you have to do. Contact their support or remove all the code and reupload it as 2.0

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by l0b0 ( 803611 )

      Alright, maybe this is useful to someone...

      Shell scripts:

      Other projects include an ISO mount/unmount script for Nautilus [l0b0.net], XForms data entry [l0b0.net] and the LHC installation circular dashboard [l0b0.net].

  • following, not leading (Score:4, Interesting)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:30AM (#22990104)
    They might have given it a name but there was a great deal of free software around 10 years ago. My impression from those times (and it was only 10 years, we're not talking a lifetime here) is that the primary driver for free software was the internet - not a bunch of people at a conference, even if they call it a summit.

  • Last ditch effort for companies going south (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rabbit_Fish ( 526184 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:32AM (#22990130)
    The one quote that really bugged me is the following one from Ousterhout:

    > The third thing that has negatively impressed me is
    > that open source is often used as a desperate last-ditch
    > effort for loser software. If a product is doing poorly
    > in the marketplace, sometimes companies release it as
    > open source, hoping that will somehow magically revive
    > it and make it widely used. This almost never works.

    Does this guy not realize that Firefox was born from Netscape going south? I'm sure there are other examples out there, but how obvious does one need to be?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pohl ( 872 )
      I don't see how his statement ("This almost never works") and the anecdotal case of mozilla's success are mutually exclusive. Or are you asserting that a success like Firefox is the common case?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Does this guy not realize that Firefox was born from Netscape going south? I'm sure there are other examples out there, but how obvious does one need to be?

      Well, unless I've completely missed my Firefox history classes the original Netscape Navigator code that was supposed to be NN5 was so horrible that it was all scrapped, rather than released. So yeah, it became the rallying flag against IE but I would hardly call Mozilla a revival of the Navigator in the sense he's thinking of. Still, from the business side you can always try to fly when falling off a cliff and from the community side the alternative would be that it went quietly into the abyss. Worst case

  • Preaching to the choir (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:38AM (#22990200) Journal
    now it is widely embraced

    Er, no.

    I still, on a daily basis, run into people who would rather buy software than use OSS alternatives because they firmly believe "you get what you pay for". And this in the "Joe Sixpack" crowd, not even talking about fellow IT professionals.

    Among them, I get much more polarized attitudes - They either embrace it, or shun it (with reasons ranging from the "viral" licensing BS, to (yes, seriously) tirades about damned hippies trying to buck the system).

    Me, I'll just use what works. Sometimes that means paying for software, but I can usually find something comparable and Free (and with a price tag of "free", I give "comparable" quite a bit of leeway).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Trelane ( 16124 )
      So put it on a CD and charge 'em some money! Heck, because they're being so generous, you can even throw in the source code for *free*!

    • "you get what you pay for". And this in the "Joe Sixpack" crowd, not even talking about fellow IT professionals.
      That's because "free" has been used as a marketing scheme for such a long time that people have decided there's some big catch whenever someone says something is "free". It's the main reason Open Source was pushed as a replacement for "free software".

      Maybe a good comeback to people who talk about "getting what you pay for" is asking if they think sex you pay for is better than "free" sex. (Of co

    • Among [IT professionals], I get much more polarized attitudes - They either embrace it, or shun it (with reasons ranging from the "viral" licensing BS, to (yes, seriously) tirades about damned hippies trying to buck the system).
      Some embrace it, some shun it ... but still others have no clue that it exists. Last week I was in a meeting about the set of standard software to be put on a bunch of the lab machines at the college where I teach. The head of IT thought "GPL" was a piece of software that the facu

  • Correction to the article title (Score:5, Informative)

    by Macthorpe ( 960048 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @11:40AM (#22990218) Journal
    Just one letter, nothing big:

    Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's FOSS movement.
    Considering the BSD license was published about 8 years before that, I think the only thing the summit marked was the politicisation of the Open Source Software movement, not it's creation.

    • Of course, when I said title, I meant summary. That'll teach me not to preview.
  • The open source movement was already well under way before the Open Source summit. It was already well on its way before the GNU manifesto and the founding of the FSF. There's a perception that it's big events like these that "created" the open source movement. That's not so, it's the open source movement that's created the possibility of big exciting events.

    Even people talking about f/l/oss before these events seem to miss it. for example, Ousterhout's comment "When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world."

    The Software Tools applications and libraries date back to the '70s. So does Emacs. So do the enormous collection of software published in Dr Dobbs' journal. So do the DECUS and other user group tapes. Much of this was game software, but it also included free compilers and interpreters (Forth, Small C, Tiny C, Tiny Basic, Tiny Pascal), editors (including emacs), operating system monitors (and early attempts at UNIX workalikes), and networks. Usenet was an open source project, and there were soon open source gateways between Usenet and networks like Fidonet... and one of the earliest Usenet groups was "net.sources".

    I would say the first open source decade was the '70s, though in a way it's as old as the computer industry: "in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years" -- Richard Stallman. It's been argued that it wasn't really until the '70s that closed source really got under way, so one might say that it was the creation of a binary, non-shared, closed-source software industry that created what became the open-source movement (under whatever name you like).

    So depending on whether you include the '60s, we're coming up on the end of the 4th or 5th "open source decade", the '00s. Not the first.
    • Now THAT sounds more like the computing world I grew up in! There was a time when most stuff was just out there, and none of us cared much about what minor revision of which license it was released under, because we were just sharing code.

      Magazines publishing code to type in was an excellent example. If you typed it in, you could modify it or make copies for your friends at will. Did the license explicitly allow or forbid it? I have no idea--the community understood the idea of community software. It just w
    • ...when you count "open source" projects.

      "Free" software was a concept that I think really emerged with the release of GNU Emacs. Gosling EMACS and Stallman's PDP EMACS may have been "open source" but they weren't truly "Free software". Being that it's 10 years after the FREE software summit that the discussion is around that rather than simply computer programs with widely distributed source code.

      In the loosest sense of the definition, open source has existed since at least the 1960s. Computers were not

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by argent ( 18001 )
        "Free" software was a concept that I think really emerged with the release of GNU Emacs.

        Software Tools, Fig-Forth, Small C, many families of truly free and open software were already in broad use well before then. These are not "shared source" like the old academic UNIX license or IBM's operating systems, they were free software in every sense of the word.

        I was part of this community in the early '80s, and for a lot of us the GNU Manifesto was received with a big fat "so what". We were already doing what he
      • Let's be more explicit -- in the 1970s the industry was based around renting computer time or CPU cycles. Industry donated computers to places like MIT so that programmers like RMS could gin up software that would create more demand for CPU cycles. The software was free, but the ability to run it wasn't unless you were one of the blessed few.

        This business model never really translated well onto the micro/mini space where the CPU itself was sold rather than leased. Now the software was the value and the comp
        • That the FOSS movement hasn't yet learned the personal computing paradigm is a crucial insight.

          Its first problem is that most FOSS developers are coding for themselves or their programmer/sysadmin peers, not end-users (and usually not even application developers, since a "Linux" desktop platform remains poorly defined / non-existent).

          The second problem is going overboard with Unix culture, which leads FOSS advocates to stump for thin client / server architecture and centralized control often without even re

  • So YOU'RE the guy to blame... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kozz ( 7764 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @12:03PM (#22990578)

    John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language...

    I realize that a creator is not responsible in any way for the various ways in which is creation is used. But I have to wrestle with Tcl code every day because it was packaged with a large commercial application my team supports. Its strength is also its weakness: almost anyone can learn to use it (and frequently badly).

    And why is the Tcl interpreter so brain-dead? Consider the complaints from the interpreter when encountering "unbalanced grouping symbols" that are contained within a comment. Most parsers throw out all contents of a comment as soon as it's identified. But if you have an expression like
    set foo "bar"; # (oops forgot a closing paren
    it will refuse to work. WTF?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tclgeek ( 587784 )

      The only WTF is that you've failed to fully grasp how Tcl works. Tcl requires something of an experienced and open-minded perspective. You can't take what you learned in your C or Java class and expect Tcl to work the same way.

      There's a reason why comment parsing is the way it is, and generally speaking it's a good reason. Much like there's a reason Python uses whitespace for indentation. Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but it serves a purpose. And much like Python's use of whitespace, Tcl's comment beha

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by amorsen ( 7485 )

        Not that PHP is a bad language per se, but after living by choice with Tcl for over a decade, most other languages pale in comparison.
        It's the other way around. TCL isn't a particularly good language, but almost anything is better than PHP.

    • I'm to blame as well. (Score:5, Informative)

      by argent ( 18001 ) <peter@NOsPAm.slashdot.2006.taronga.com> on Monday April 07, 2008 @12:36PM (#22991092) Homepage Journal
      And why is the Tcl interpreter so brain-dead?

      Because it's simple. Deliberately so. It's inspired by Lisp.

      There's 11 rules that define the complete syntax for Tcl, everything else including control structures is built up on top of that.

      I'm responsible for some of the complexity that IS in there, originally there wasn't a distinction between {...} lists and "..." strings at all: I'm the one who suggested that variable substitution be allowed inside "...".

      But if you have an expression like
      set foo "bar"; # (oops forgot a closing paren
      it will refuse to work.

      No, that one's OK, but if you have
      set foo "bar"; # {oops forgot a closing brace
      it may not work.

      The reason is that the parsing of comments happens at the block level, but the parsing of blocks happens at the list level. So {# this list happens to start with "pound sign"} is a list. The fact that that list might happen to be code as well doesn't make a difference when it's parsing lists.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kozz ( 7764 )

        So {# this list happens to start with "pound sign"} is a list. The fact that that list might happen to be code as well doesn't make a difference when it's parsing lists.

        Ah, but there are only two ways to create valid comments in Tcl (I think?):
        1. where octothorpe (pound, hash, #) is the first non-whitespace character on a line
        OR
        2. where octothorpe is the first character following a semicolon-terminated line

        Am I wrong about this? It means that your example above is certainly not a comment, and I don't expect it to be.

        set foo [list {#valid list item} {bar} {baz}]; # { unmatched brace in a comment produces error here

        Otherwise perhaps the "Tcl and Tk" book I've g

        • Those are the same case. A comment comes at the beginning of a statement.

          set foo [list {#valid list item} {bar} {baz}]; # { unmatched brace in a comment produces error here

          There's no distinction in Tcl between {#valid list item} and {#a code block starting with a comment}.

          Here's another example that might help you understand:

          ### chunk one
          set separators {# ! @ % --}
          if {[lindex $separators $token] >= 0} {# It's a separator
          lappend seplist $token
          set token [next_token]
          }

          #

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kozz ( 7764 )
            Brilliant explanation. Thanks! I acknowledge that the simplicity of Tcl allows one to accomplish much, although I stand by my original assessment: my non-developer co-workers should never write code (Tcl or otherwise) if they've not had so much as a single university-level "Programming 101" course. I can't say it much better than this:

            And god, the code they generate sucks asteroids through soda straws
            (again, not the fault of Tcl). Thanks. :)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by argent ( 18001 )
              I stand by my original assessment: my non-developer co-workers should never write code (Tcl or otherwise) if they've not had so much as a single university-level "Programming 101" course.

              Maybe, maybe not. I've been a network administrator and support guy for a group of 150 PhD programmers, and some were very good but some, well... the code they write sucks asteroids through soda straws. :)

              Some people "get it", and some don't.
      • The reason is that the parsing of comments happens at the block level, but the parsing of blocks happens at the list level. So {# this list happens to start with "pound sign"} is a list. The fact that that list might happen to be code as well doesn't make a difference when it's parsing lists.

        I'm sorry to be so blunt and rude but...

        IT'S A FUCKING *COMMENT*

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by argent ( 18001 )
          Tcl isn't an ad-hoc language trying to map english-language concepts (like "it's a fucking comment") into something that computers can deal with, it's a language based on a syntax and set of semantics that has consequences on the design of the language.

          It's not alone in this. Consider comments in Forth. Comments in Forth are implemented by making the opening parenthesis of the comment a Forth word:

          : ( 29 word drop ; immediate

          This means that when the Forth outer interpreter reads something like this:

          : myword
          • Either its a comment or it is not.

            If it is read and interpreted by the compiler, and not as a compiler directive eg #include (which is read and acted on by the pre-processor), its not a fucking comment.

            Comments are things you can insert into the code and the compiler/interpreter FUCKING WELL IGNORES THEM!

            If you run the preprocessor over the code, what comes out HAS NO COMMENTS! No different for interpreted languages.

            SHEESH

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by argent ( 18001 )
              Either its a comment or it is not.

              OK, then Tcl doesn't have comments. It has wakalixes. Wakalixes are just like comments, but don't elicit profanity from people who think there's some god-given definition of "comments" that it's blasphemy to ignore.

              If it is read and interpreted by the compiler, and not as a compiler directive

              Tcl doesn't have "compiler directives". The reason Tcl doesn't have "compiler directives" is actually pretty central to the reason why Tcl comments work the way they do.

              If you run the p
              • Look, if a # is a comment sign which is supposed to indicate that the text following it is to be disregarded by the interpreter/compiler and you wish to use a # in your code somewhere, what is wrong with *escaping* the # sign so that the interpreter/compiler 'knows' what you intend?

                Because it starts to look as if tcl breaks commenting in order to get away with not escaping things like # sign comments.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by argent ( 18001 )
                  Different languages have different commenting and escaping mechanisms. Tcl doesn't "break comments" any more than the fact that you can't nest /* ... */ comments in C means that C "breaks comments".

                  In Tcl, "#" is a comment *statement*. If it doesn't appear where a statement is expected, it's not a comment. In Tcl, this is a single comment:

                  This is similar to the ":" comment command in the UNIX shell, the "(" comment word in forth, and the "REM" comment statement in Basic. HTML and XML comments have restricti
                  • In the second paragraph, elide "In Tcl, this is a single comment:", I missed that when I removed an example.

            • You really ought to learn a little bit about how Forth works before making more of a fool of yourself in public. I wrote a tutorial here [annexia.org] on the subject.

              Rich.

  • Open Source is new? (Score:5, Informative)

    by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @12:14PM (#22990760) Homepage Journal
    When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s ..., there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world.

    You've missed a lot of computing history. Maybe the capitalized phrase "Open Source" was new, but the practice wasn't. For instance, before the mini/micro-computer "revolution", I worked on a number of IBM mainframes, all of which used VM as their main OS. VM originated in academia, and its source was always available to anyone interested. Of course, not too many people wanted it unless they had an IBM mainframe. Most such installations had a VM guru on the staff, and the VM gurus I knew were quite open with their source.

    Around the same time, on one such machines, the engineering staff brought in Amdahl's unix system, which ran on VM of course. When we asked about source, the reply was "That's not an option; you get it whether you want it or not." "Open Source" may not have been a catch phrase yet, but Amdahl was happy to have customers with employees who could read the source, since that made their support job a lot easier. In fact, I sent them a kernel bug fix about a month after we got the system installed; I got back a nice "Thanks!" letter and was added to their published list of code contributors.

    A more accurate history would be that open source was quite common before the mid-1980s, but it didn't need a name. Software vendors routinely gave source to customers who wanted it, with the expectation that customers would find and fix bugs and maybe add new features. One of Microsoft's innovations was to hold their source as proprietary, so as not to allow customers to improve the software. A lot of people were amazed that customers actually accepted this. You heard a lot of questions like "Would they buy a truck or car that couldn't be worked on by any mechanics except the manufacturer's?" But then, when it became clear that Microsoft had gotten away with such a dodgy scheme, it was quickly adopted by others, so that customers would have to pay them for patching up the bugs.

    It still sorta amazes me that customers can be so dense as to pay money for products that can't be repaired by anyone but the manufacturer (and usually now not even by them). So much for the economists' idea of a rational marketplace.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by argent ( 18001 )
      Well, source shared with customers wasn't quite the same thing as open source... the main difference being that you couldn't redistribute it. That's what Microsoft has been calling "shared source". In the early '80s a friend of mine and I started putting together a company called "Tangible Software", with the idea that our distinction would be that our customers would get our code, and could work on it and share changes back with us, but it never got further than that because we went on to other things.

      But

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SL Baur ( 19540 )

      A more accurate history would be that open source was quite common before the mid-1980s, but it didn't need a name.

      True. Unix was distributed as source to Universities. To name some specific examples, X10 and Emacs were distributed as source. net.sources* was gaining popularity.

      The earliest commercial Unix I had at home (a System VR1/2 hybrid) was distributed with some open source (rather amazing since the whole distribution was on 360k floppies).

      Going back even further, wasn't CP/M-80 sometimes distributed as source?

    • A more accurate history would be that open source was quite common before the mid-1980s, but it didn't need a name.

      Actually when it started, it couldn't afford to have a name, or any kind of open recognition:

      I took an "Introduction to FORTRAN" course in 1972 or 1973. It was a different world back then— so different that my memories of using coding tablets and punching Hollerith cards now seem unbelievable, like some kind of weird steampunk dream.

      But I do clearly remember parts of lectures that the system administrator gave us. About how the college was running a beefed up IBM 1130 obtained by soliciting dona

  • Depending who you ask, the open source concept has been working in practice for 20, 30, 40, or even 52 years: IBM SHARE was founded in 1955. [linux.com]

    By anyone's definition it's at least as old as the Free Software Foundation, which makes this article's premise ridiculous.

    Holy fact checking Batman.

  • The development I had hoped to see in Open Source but never did:
    Exploit the fact that Open Source projects (potentially) have a lot more ears then closed source.

  • Computer Magazines (Score:3, Insightful)

    by slapout ( 93640 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @12:45PM (#22991252)
    Does anybody remember back when computer magazines used to print programs in source code form for you to type in? That was certainly one way of making the code available.
  • The Floss Weekly Podcast (24) had an interview with the founder of POVRay. That's a project whose source was available in 1987! I remember using it on my Atari ST back in the mid 90s.

  • This article is nuts! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) * <bruce@perens.com> on Monday April 07, 2008 @01:13PM (#22991570) Homepage Journal

    After the announcement, Netscape assembled a group experts to participate in a strategy session at which the term "open source" was first conceived. The participants also assembled a new philosophy that reconciled the ideological principles of software freedom with the pragmatism of commercial software development. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was then founded to supply and maintain an official definition for the open source philosophy.

    No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.

    Bruce

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )
      No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.

      Bruce, as people have repeatedly pointed out to you on slashdot, the term "open source" predates the OSI by several years. I know that people have repeatedly pointed out to you that the term "open source" in terms of available, distributable source code was used years before OSI purportedly came up with it. A search on

      • Re:This article is nuts! (Score:4, Informative)

        by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) * <bruce@perens.com> on Monday April 07, 2008 @09:07PM (#22995954) Homepage Journal
        Hi Nomadic,

        Before the Open Source Initiative was founded and the Open Source Definition was published, the term "open source" was commonly used to refer to a form of military intelligence, and that meaning still survives. There are a few references - not a ton - before that date to "open source code" to refer to published source code, but with no rights connected with it. The campaign started in February 1998 and "Open Source" gained a specific meaning at that time.

        I understand your point. I just don't feel it's important, because until the start of the campaign the phrase was not particularly important. So, you can stop now. Also, please do me a favor and don't try to remind Richard Stallman that the two words "free software" were said in combination before his campaign, and meant something else. Of course they were. But you'd just be annoying him for no reason and he might not be as nice about it as me :-)

        Thanks

        Bruce

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nomadic ( 141991 )
          I understand your point. I just don't feel it's important, because until the start of the campaign the phrase was not particularly important. So, you can stop now. Also, please do me a favor and don't try to remind Richard Stallman that the two words "free software" were said in combination before his campaign, and meant something else. Of course they were. But you'd just be annoying him for no reason and he might not be as nice about it as me :-)

          First of all, the phrase "open" in software terms was an i
          • Take a look at my speech to the UN World Summit [wikimedia.org] in which I give Richard credit. Note what Richard does :-)

            Free Software was the first campaign to clearly associate rights with source code. Publicly distributed source code existed even before then, and sometimes had rights that complied with the OSD. The OSD was written to fit existing licenses, primarily BSD, GPL, and Artistic. Although Richard had published an article about the four freedoms in GNUs Bulletin number 4, he didn't maintain any publication ab

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by skeeto ( 1138903 )

      No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.

      How the heck would you know, Mr. know-it-all? What, where you at the VA Linux Systems meeting or something? Next you're gonna say you personally know Christine Petersen. Or even RMS.

      (I am kidding. I know who Bruce Perens is, mostly thanks to seeing this [google.com] a few years ago.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skeeto ( 1138903 )
        I guess a whole sentence explaining that I was joking is still too subtle. Do mods even finish reading posts before moderating?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) *
        Actually, I was not at the meeting. Eric Raymond brought me the results of the meeting the next day. I proposed to change the Debian Free Software Guidelines to be the Open Source Definition at that time.

        Interestingly enough, the Open Source Definition - and thus the "philosophy" of Open Source that the article discusses predates the founding of OSI by some 8 months, and thus the summit referred to in the article by 10 months. It was complete by the end of June, 1997, as part of Debian's promise to the com

  • It's hard to find successful examples of higher-level applications that are open source. I think this is fundamental in the nature of open-source software and will never change: open-source software comes about when developers build things that they themselves want to use. Things that aren't used by developers won't be implemented in open-source fashion; there is no incentive for anyone to do this.

    I partly agree with this, but there are also end-user applications where there is virtually no commercial softw
  • I've been coding off and on since the early 1980's. The idea that open source coincided with a big conference that supposedly kicked everything off is nuts. Conferences require people interested in the same topic to be profitable. Conferences therefore are thought followers, not leaders.

    When I first got on the Internet some 19 years ago, there was already a healthy community of free and semi-free projects. There was a lot of code sharing, particularly in Unix sources on newsgroups.

    I ported more than my fair

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