The Term 'Open Source' Is Proposed and the OSI Forms in 1998
How a strategy meeting, Netscape's source release, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines produced a new advocacy label.
In February 1998, participants meeting after Netscape’s source announcement discussed a new label for freely redistributable source code. Christine Peterson proposed “open source.” Advocates including Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens promoted the term, and the Open Source Initiative formed soon afterward.
The Open Source Definition drew from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The campaign did not invent collaborative source development or free-software licensing; it reframed them for a broader business and engineering audience.
Three weeks in early 1998
The sequence was compressed. On January 22, 1998, Netscape announced it would release the source code of its Communicator browser suite — a mainstream commercial vendor voluntarily freeing its flagship product, which made “what do we call this model?” an urgent question. Eric Raymond, whose essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar Netscape had cited as an influence on the decision, flew out on February 2 to help plan the release. The next evening a strategy session at the Foresight Institute’s office turned to how this development model could be pitched to businesses that heard “free software” and thought “no revenue.” Christine Peterson, Foresight’s co-founder, had been working the naming problem and came up with “open source.”
The term got its field test on February 5 at a meeting at VA Research, with Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, Todd Anderson, Raymond, Peterson, and — by phone — Jon “maddog” Hall. By Peterson’s own account she stayed mostly quiet while Todd Anderson simply used “open source” naturally throughout the discussion, until near the end the group realized it had already adopted the term it was supposed to be debating.
Definition first, label second
The label came with a specification attached. Bruce Perens had written the Debian Free Software Guidelines in 1997 to define what Debian would accept into its distribution; he reworked them, minus the Debian-specific references, into the Open Source Definition. Perens and Raymond then founded the Open Source Initiative in late February 1998 to steward the definition and the opensource.org site. An attempt to register “open source” as a trademark did not succeed — the phrase was judged too descriptive — which is why the term has always been policed through the OSD as a written definition rather than through a mark, and why OSI later relied on an “OSI Certified” certification mark for licenses instead.
Adoption, and the argument that never ended
Netscape shipped the Communicator source on March 31, 1998, launching the Mozilla project. On April 7, 1998, Tim O’Reilly convened leaders of major projects in an event announced as the Freeware Summit and reported afterward as the Open Source Summit — an effective ratification of the rebrand. Linus Torvalds endorsed the new term; Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation considered and rejected it, arguing that it dropped the actual point, software freedom, in favor of a development-methodology sales pitch. The licensing overlap between the two camps has always been nearly total, which is precisely why the argument persists: it is a disagreement about emphasis and philosophy, not about which licenses qualify.
The Netscape code itself had a harder road than the terminology it inspired: much of the released Communicator code was eventually abandoned in favor of a rewrite around the new Gecko engine, and it took until Firefox 1.0 in November 2004 for the open-development bet to pay off in market share. The vocabulary, by contrast, stuck almost immediately — within a year, “open source” was the default label in press coverage, business plans, and conference names for what had previously been described half a dozen inconsistent ways.
That history explains why “open source” has a specific licensing definition and should not be reduced to “source visible.” Related: Free Software and Open Source: Shared Code, Different Historical Arguments · How to Explore Historically Significant Source Code Directly
Sources: OSI history, Open Source Definition, Christine Peterson’s account