Open source: ten years old and growing

Sam Varghese
Saturday, 09 February 2008 20:15

Opinion and Analysis

Ten years ago, Bruce Perens made what would be a move with huge repercussions, when he published what he called the Open Source Definition. That definition has helped hundreds of businesses but Perens himself does not rank very high in the popularity stakes these days because of his opposition to the marriage between Novell and Microsoft.
Perens' intention, back on February 9, 1998,  was, in his own words, "for Open Source to simply be another way of talking about Free Software, tailored to the ears of business people." At the same time, he has never shied away from acknowledging the debt which everyone who uses any form of FOSS owes to Richard M. Stallman.

"In building our Open Source campaign, we were standing on the shoulders of a giant. Starting in the early 1980s, Richard Stallman blazed the trail with his philosophy of Free Software  and the creation of the GNU System,  which, most notably when it was combined with the Linux kernel, changed the way software works forever," he writes in a message to the community to mark the decade.

After Perens published the Open Source Definition - which was derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines - he and Eric Raymond launched the Open Source Initiative, an advocacy organisation. The creation of the term open source led to many a flame war with the free software crowd.

While the terms free software and open source are often used as synonyms, there are fundamental differences - in order for software to meet the definition of "free", it has to provide four freedoms - freedom to run the program for any purpose; freedom to study the source code and then change it if one wishes; freedom to help one's neighbour with its use and rights of distribution.

Open source software, while giving the idea that it will always include source code, does not always adhere to this; there are many open source products which include software that is under licences which do not meet the Free Software Foundation's definition of a "free software" licence. To quote the FSF itself: "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement."