{"id":7834,"date":"2018-02-04T21:53:49","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T02:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7834"},"modified":"2018-02-04T21:53:49","modified_gmt":"2018-02-05T02:53:49","slug":"how-open-source-was-coined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7834","title":{"rendered":"How &#8220;open source&#8221; was coined"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the term &#8220;open source&#8221;.  Three days before that, Christine Peterson published <a href=\"https:\/\/opensource.com\/article\/18\/2\/coining-term-open-source-software#comments\">How I coined the term &#8216;open source&#8217; <\/a> which apparently she hd written on 2006 but been sitting on since.<\/p>\n<p>This is my addition to the history; I tried to leave an earlier version as a comment on her post but it disappeared into a moderation queue and hasn&#8217;t come out.<\/p>\n<p>The most important point: Chris&#8217;s report accurately matches my recollection of events and I fully endorse it.  There are, however, a few points of historical interest that can be added.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>First, a point of fact.  Chris doesn&#8217;t remember for sure whether it was me or Todd Anderson that first brought up the need for a new umbrella term to replace &#8220;free software&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It was me, and it was me for a reason. In those very early days I was ahead of the rest of our leadership in understanding a few critical things about our new circumstances.  Others eventually did catch up, but at the time of this meeting I think I was the only person there who had fully grasped that what we needed to take our folkways mainstream we needed a full-fledged marketing and rebranding campaign.<\/p>\n<p>That insight was driving my thinking, and led me directly to the conclusion that we needed a better label for the brand.<\/p>\n<p>It was a little tricky for me to talk about this insight explicitly, and I mostly didn&#8217;t.  Because I also knew that in the minds of the people in that room, and most other hackers, &#8220;marketing and rebranding&#8221; was a negative idea heavily tied to fakery and insincerity.  I couldn&#8217;t blame them for this; I&#8217;d had to struggle with the concept myself before making some peace with it.  But&#8230;I was unable to evade the historical moment, and saw what was needed.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, I had the dual challenge of trying to lead a rebranding campaign while easing hackers into comfort with the idea of rebranding. That meant not pushing too hard or too fast &#8211; choosing my interventions carefully and allowing other people to catch up with the implications in their own ways.<\/p>\n<p>Chris couldn&#8217;t read my mind, so she had no way to know that I spotted &#8220;open source&#8221; as the winner we were looking for the first or second time the phrase was mentioned &#8211; <em>well<\/em> before I explicitly advocated for it myself. It seemed perfect to me &#8211; ideologically neutral, easy to parse, and with just enough connection to an already respectable term of art (that is, intelligence-community use of &#8220;open source&#8221;) to be useful.<\/p>\n<p>There was also something right about the use of &#8220;open&#8221; that I couldn&#8217;t pin down exactly at the time.  I knew this was an adjective with a lot of positive loading attached in the hacker culture, but I was not then clear on the exact psychology.  Now I think I understand that better &#8211; it evokes the Big Five trait &#8220;openness to experience&#8221;, which we value a lot.  That particular term didn&#8217;t exist yet in 1998, but the connotative web that would later give rise to it did.<\/p>\n<p>In accordance with my strategy of wu wei I hung back a little and let other people there gravitate to &#8220;open source&#8221;, rather than pushing for it as hard as I could have right out of the gate. I would have fought for it over the alternatives if I&#8217;d had to, but I didn&#8217;t&#8230;we all got there and that was a far healthier outcome than if I had tried to dominate the discussion.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m telling this story this way because, now that Chris has admitted she was being a bit stealthy about getting the term adopted, she deserves to know that I was being a bit stealthy myself &#8211; for reasons that seemed good at the time and still do in retrospect.<\/p>\n<p>The rest of the story is more public.  A few weeks later what was in effect a war council of the hacker community&#8217;s chieftains, convened by Tim O&#8217;Reilly, voted to endorse the new term and in effect gave me a mandate to go out and evangelize it. Which of course I did; the rest is both metaphorically and literally history.<\/p>\n<p>I think Chris is fully entitled to her happy twinge. From the perspective of twenty years later, &#8220;open source&#8221; was a smashing success, fully justifying both her and my hopes for what we could do with this rebranding.<\/p>\n<p>Without Chris, I would have had to come up with something as good as &#8220;open source&#8221; myself in order to get the mission done. Maybe I would have, maybe not.  I&#8217;m glad we didn&#8217;t have to roll those dice; I&#8217;m glad Chris nailed it for all of us.<\/p>\n<p>Ever since I was first reminded that it was her coinage I&#8217;ve been careful to credit Chris for it.  I was impressed with her for the invention, and that developed into a friendship that we both value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the term &#8220;open source&#8221;. Three days before that, Christine Peterson published How I coined the term &#8216;open source&#8217; which apparently she hd written on 2006 but been sitting on since. This is my addition to the history; I tried to leave an earlier version as a&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7834\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How &#8220;open source&#8221; was coined<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,28,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacker-culture","category-mr-famous-guy","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7835,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7834\/revisions\/7835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}