Open source turns 10
On February 9, 1998 Bruce Perens published his defining document of the open source movement, the Open Source Definition. On the same day, together with Eric Raymond, Perens announced plans for the Open Source Initiative the two were planning to launch.
Now, on the tenth anniversary of defining the term open source, Perens this week published his State of Open Source, in which he looks back on the decade.
Despite being preceded by many years by Richard Stallman’s Free Software movement, the OSI and the term Open Source Software have embedded themselves in the software world and today “open source” is perhaps the more often used description of the movement. Perens is quick to admit, however, that “in building our Open Source campaign, we were standing on the shoulders of a giant. Starting in the early 1980’s, 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.”
The main mistake of the open source software campaign, says Perens, was that it created a conflict with the free software movement. “My intent has always been for Open Source to simply be another way of talking about Free Software, tailored to the ears of business people, and that it would eventually lead them to a greater appreciation of Richard Stallman’s arguments,” Perens writes.
He notes the success of open souce systems on business servers and embedded systems, saying this has been the greatest fo the OSS movement’s contributions.
“In contrast, we have not yet achieved the penetration that we might have desired on user desktop systems … Today we are seeing much of the value of software move from the desktop to the network, an area in which we are already entrenched. This can only lead to the expansion of Open Source on the systems in individual user’s hands.”
One of the successes of open source and free software, says Perens is in the realm of innovation. We have actually changed the way that innovation happens. Innovation has gone public. Many companies, institutions, and individuals share innovation on a daily basis, entirely in the open, through Free Software development communities. The products they produce are the leaders in their field. Public innovation eliminates the high transaction costs of lawyers, lawsuits and licensing. It focuses on building a fertile community across the market for idea creation and utilization rather than dividing the market for the direct monetization of ideas as property. This is the economically most efficient approach for most companies.”
