Interviews: Ask a Question To Christine Peterson, the Nanotech Expert Who Coined the Term 'Open Source' 246
Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998. Now Christine's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers. We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
Interestingly, Christine was also on the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on the state of California's nanotechnology task force. Her tech talks at conferences include "Life Extension for Geeks" at Gnomedex and "Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security" at the 2007 Singularity Summit. Another talk argues that the nanotech revolution will be like the information revolution, except that "Instead of with bits, we should do it with atoms," allowing molecule-sized machines that can kill cancer and repair DNA. Her most recent publication is "Cyber, Nano, and AGI RIsks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks." Christine graduated from MIT with a bachelors in chemistry.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
Interestingly, Christine was also on the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on the state of California's nanotechnology task force. Her tech talks at conferences include "Life Extension for Geeks" at Gnomedex and "Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security" at the 2007 Singularity Summit. Another talk argues that the nanotech revolution will be like the information revolution, except that "Instead of with bits, we should do it with atoms," allowing molecule-sized machines that can kill cancer and repair DNA. Her most recent publication is "Cyber, Nano, and AGI RIsks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks." Christine graduated from MIT with a bachelors in chemistry.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
Open source and medicine (Score:5, Interesting)
How can we more open source medical software? Given that medical devices are so heavily regulated it seems like it will be hard to get, say, an open source pacemaker system that users can hack, or at least audit.
Radio software seems to be in a similar state - cellular modems, wifi chipsets etc. are all heavily regulated and closed source, with signed code required for updates.
Patents, copyright and licensing (Score:3)
Cut back the max term lengths to something sane like 5 years.
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We just need an organization with money to backup the product from all the lawsuits that will go against it.
Most medical software is closed source, because they need to collect every cent to keep the organization strong enough, to survive, a mountain of legal battles.
A person is very sick and they die. Their family sues the doctor for not spotting the problems, the doctor sues the medical device software for not showing them the problem (or having an error that day). The software company pays the doctor, t
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For that matter, open source software has been around since at least the advent of source code in the mid 1960s.
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Re:Open source and medicine (Score:4, Insightful)
In the late 1980s every software on UNIX still came with source code so you could build it yourself.
That dos not make it "open source".
I built hundreds of kernels for Sun OS, early Solaris and DEC Ultrix. Of course most software I built was "open source" or early GPL.
Re:Open source and medicine (Score:4, Insightful)
You've been pushing this lie a long time, but in fact there was no significant usage of the term "open source" before 1998. You've scoured the cosmos for anyone who happened to use the words open and/or source and glomming onto product names with the word "open" and then using it to act like the OSI is the bad guy.
I understand that you think you're helping free software by attacking open source software -- but you take it too far when you also fabricate out of thin out this idea that people were using the phrase "open source software" before 1998. And you also denigrate all the work and contributions of the (actual) open source movement which began in 1998.
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From 1993, using "Open Source" (capitalized, no less):
https://groups.google.com/foru... [google.com]
Also, although I can't find a link to it with a verified date, I remember playing an MSDOS game in the late 1980's called Moria that was also released as "open source". The term was, in fact, in widespread usage even before this.
OSI might be credited with the term "open source movement", but they did not invent the term "open source". The only reason why it's likely hard to find a lot of evidence of this on th
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OSI might be credited with the term "open source movement", but they did not invent the term "open source". The only reason why it's likely hard to find a lot of evidence of this on the internet prior to that time has more to do with that most of it wasn't yet even using the internet back then... but was largely on message boards of private or public BBS's.
If only I could pull up archives from forum, the software we used to communicate on the systems around scruz back in the day. It was a threaded message base which would work from a line printer... there were several fora, though. One at ucsc on ucscb, one at deeptht, etc etc. I imagine someone has 'em...
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https://groups.google.com/foru... [google.com]|sort:relevance/comp.object.corba/z803p125OJ8/cF4BSsQ2B9cJ
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You've been pushing this lie a long time, but in fact there was no significant usage of the term "open source" before 1998.
Significant? So tell me, which one should we consider more significant?
Someone uttering a term at a meeting in February 1998 (that everyone familiar with OpenBSD should have already been familiar with).
Or someone using that term and putting it into actual practice with an actual repository and an actual domain name in 1995.
Tell me, do you believe the same thing about patents? That it's not the earlier practitioner, but the later person that supposedly gets the "idea" that should get the entire credit for it
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Do you have any evidence that anyone familiar with OpenBSD was using the term "open source" back then consistently or frequently? Because I have yet to see any.
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Depends what you call "significant". ...
When I was admin of several unix clusters in my university, from roughly 1989 to 1995, we called everything "open source", regardless if it was BSD/MIT or GPL licenses.
It was just the logical name to call it. And actually except for one ephangelist, no one was talking about "free software". We only were interested in downloading it, installing it and complaining that it was not cross platform and did either not compile or the makefile was broken on a certain OS
Or we h
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You're lying. You've never proven this statement -- but you repeat it over and over because you want it to be true. And when pushed you pull out [one] press release from 1996 about proprietary software where the code was made viewable-but-not-usable.
>The Caldera press release clearly uses "Open Source" in the sense which I describe, and the sense which we were using at the time.
Great! So then we agree that Caldera's
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You're lying. You've never proven this statement -- but you repeat it over and over because you want it to be true. And when pushed you pull out [one] press release from 1996 about proprietary software where the code was made viewable-but-not-usable.
I've provided literally exactly as much proof for this statement as Christine Peterson has provided for her claims that she coined the phrase. Besides Lyle Ball (CEO of Netendeavor, formerly of Caldera) who was willing to publicly support my claim [hyperlogos.org], others here on Slashdot have come forward to support me. We were using the phrase "Open Source" to describe software whose source you could get at and compile for yourself by the mid nineties.
Great! So then we agree that Caldera's code was proprietary/non-modifiable/no distribution allowed. But Martin prefers hiding behind weasly phrases like "clearly used...in the sense which I describe." (That "sense" being proprietary/non-modifiable/no distribution code.) Whoopee. It's not something to be proud of.
This is not about pride, for me at least. This is about facts, which ar
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This is false. Eye-witness Eric Raymond supports Christine Peterson's statement. But you're just making things up.
Lyle Ball...
You're also being weasly. Ball says he used the phrase "broadly" -- which you like to pretend means "used all the ti
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I think he means that you believe that hurting the OSI helps free software.
I believe that the OSI is hurting itself by basing its reputation on a lie which is easily proven false, which is going to hurt Open Source and Free Software. I hope that sums up my position for once and for all.
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Your ID is NULL, doesn't exactly help your argument.
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Well, we could argue back and forth, but for me the GPL is the license with the least freedom.
With MIT/BSD/Apache etc. licenses the "user" can do what ever he wants, e.g. make a commercial product for sale without including the source.
GPL only makes sense for me if you do some kind of dual licensing. However for most software that makes no sense, the potential customer would simply take the GPL version.
Anyway, I'm still looking at it from the perspective of a single developer running his one man company wan
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Of course it was. But it was not called like that.
Until roughly 1990 all computers where sold with the software in source.
Heck if you wrote a piece of software for a company, you usually always would ship it in source code, or at least add the source code. Kind of pointless in a certain sense when you program in assembler, as you can not port that easy to a new platform, but: most low level programming (and that went into the late 1960s) usually always involved to write a custom VM. A VM that had instructio
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No they weren't. Stop making shit up.
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It is a typo you insensitive clod ... obviously it meant 1980, anyway the real computers like Suns, DEC etc. where sold with source code for everything minimum till 1995. (That is not a typo).
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Wasn't Eric Raymond and that lot talking about open source a lot in the mid-to-late-90's? I started getting involved in Linux just shortly before IBM killed OS/2, which was around '95 or '96 IIRC. By that time RMS had been going on about free software for years, though I don
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SCO Unix used CDE as its desktop.
It was similar to CDE, and maybe even CDE-based, but it wasn't just CDE — at least, not at the time I'm talking about. For one thing, it had an actual background desktop onto which you could drag files.
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Oh, those daze.
John Katz. Poor fellow.
Re:Open source and medicine (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't believe you're raving about proprietary software like it's somehow a good thing because they let you glimpse their source code once in a while.
You can be bought pretty cheap, drinkypoo.
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>
> I am doing no such thing. What I am [doing]
You assert things which are untrue, and expect us to congratulate you.
April 1998 by Wayback (Score:3)
http://web.archive.org/web/19980422034538/http://opensource.com:80/ [archive.org]
But it's clearly an unrelated consultancy.
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I'll say! Hilarious, this being a Microsoft Word template web page, originally hosted on IIS!
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You mean this one: http://osi.org/ [osi.org] ??
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Look at the "Coining Open Source" section.
Re:Open source and medicine (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure, she did not and does not claim that she "coined the term". Some media did, or some idiots did.
Um ...
Yes, she does claim that. [opensource.com].
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Yeah, she really does.
And I'd call bullshit on that claim. She's simply too late to the game.
Re:100% Proof Caldera coined the term prior to 199 (Score:4, Insightful)
I can remember when Slashdot used to understand the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary code.
50 years ahead (Score:2)
I heard a myth a few decades ago, that top-secret work in most fields is at least 50 years ahead of the current published state of the art. I can't begin to imagine what that would look like here.
What would that look like here? What sorts of things do you think are solidly plausible within the next 50 years of work in the field of nano-technology, and how would we detect them "in the field" today, if we were to look for them? How and where might we start to look for them, if we wanted to be likely to fin
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Some of your questions are good, but it's very unlikely that they would get asked because you didn't adhere to the "one per comment" rule. You might want to pick the ones you're most interested in and post them separately.
Re:50 years ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
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The concept is not that someone is 50 years ahead of their peers in science. The concept is that science is 50 years ahead of industry. That's actually pretty true, and this is a pretty common discussion in science.
Generally, you lose money when bringing cutting edge research to industry. I wish it were as easy as you make it seem.
I am an industrial scientist specialized in nanotechnology. I've seen the good and bad of how this works. If you have a single scientist working for a year to produce a groundbr
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Not really. In a lot of cases the public sector moves much faster. There's more money and people working on it. This wouldn't necessarily be the case in a place like the Soviet Union though. But there are cases where technology even regresses, like supersonic transport, or super-heavy space lift, so it's perfectly possible some "secret tech" is 50 years ahead or whatever.
Futurist = Idiot (Score:1)
No need to ask any questions, the answers will be worthless anyways.
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Some things are obvious and do not need a "Futurist" to predict it. Others just got lucky. If you have 1000 morons making predictions, somebody will be right repeatedly.
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Some things are obvious and do not need a "Futurist" to predict it.
Then name names. You cant. Hand waving is not an argument.
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Do your own research. Requesting proof on ./ is not only highly impolite, it is missing the point.
Recent improvements in physical security (Score:2)
Recently big gains have been made in physical security. Many phones are encrypted by default and relatively difficult for unauthorized persons to unlock. Encrypted storage is increasingly common for computers too, although open source support for technologies like OPALv2 seems to be lagging behind closed source systems. In 2017 AMD introduced encrypted RAM.
All of these rely on special hardware to protect encryption keys and perform encryption functions at speeds fast enough to avoid any significant performa
Transitioning (Score:1)
Nanotech threat landscape (Score:2)
How concerned should we be about nanotechnology equivalents of the software threats we see today?
I would hate to have my circulatory system held hostage for bitcoin.
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Serious question. (Score:3)
What do you think Tyrell Corporation should do with its current batch of Nexus 6 replicants? Obviously the 4 year life span has its own problems and wasn't the cure-all Dr. Tyrell expected.
With enough eyeballs going over their source code, could open sourcing their programming find the cause of their tendency to rebel?
Is physical security a political problem? (Score:1)
Is physical security a political problem?
At the tail end of it, there are countries acquiring anti-aircraft missile batteries, ballistic missiles or both, to guarantee their physical security. Or hypersonic anti-ship missiles or warheads. Should NATO be disbanded, and should more countries become able to sink aircraft carriers and warships full of Tomahawk missiles at will?
Should we see "national intranets" as a good thing and try to build them?
Getting closer to the subject of possible "nanobot" attacks, or
Pollution (Score:3)
Open source or free software (Score:3)
In my view, Stallman created Free software as an ethical point. He didn't like that companies were selling software without source code. (To be clear, Stallman doesn't mind selling software, because the GPL allows that. Stallman doesn't like software without source code.)
And the term open source software was invented to communicate a way of working together on something. Out of the chaos of the bazaar comes something good.
Do you agree with that?
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Also:
Some people prefer one term over the other. I'm curious: all these years later, do you still prefer the term open source software or are you more aligned to Free software?
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What was it like in 1998? (Score:2)
And how does it all compare to when you first joined the tech scene in the 1980s?
Why Nanotechnology, for Laypeople (Score:1)
Open Source Utopia (Score:1)
Nanotech Prognosis (Score:1)
How to deal with nanotech hype problem? (Score:2)
I am a nanotechnologist. I've done great academic research, worked for the government, managed a few grants, and started a few companies.
It's very easy to hype the potential of nanotechnology.
On the other hand, it's very hard to get attention put on results from serious commercial efforts.
Granting agencies and our community are not good at supporting companies that do what we all tell each other needs to get done (i.e. NanoIntegris). We are great at supporting academic research groups that have a patina of
How important is visualization of nano surfaces? (Score:2)
I.e. how important is it for researchers and manufacturers to observe objects at the nano level, how often and how easily? What kinds of improvements in methods like atomic force microscopy would be most relevant for researchers, and what other methods/breakthroughs would be key in your opinion? (Disclosure, I work for an AMF manufacturer, just started.)
Also when will we have self-assembling nanorobots like in Michael Crichton's Prey? (J/k, that falls under "hype" from previous question. :-)
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Ummm... everything else in the summary makes her an expert on what Slashdot asks her (if they stay on topic).
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Ummm... everything else in the summary makes her an expert on what Slashdot asks her (if they stay on topic).
Well, no. She seems to be an expert on nanotechnology. If Drexler wanted to co-write a book with her, that definitely demonstrates her chops. But she's clearly not an expert on Open Source Software. She didn't even know that people were using the term in 1995 and prior when she claims to have coined it. Even I know that, because I was one of the people who were using it. If she didn't know that, she is about as far from being an expert on that subject as it is possible to be.
I checked her qualifications bef
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she claims to have coined it. /., mentions that she has coined it. I'm not aware that she herself claims that, and even if she had coined it, why would she claim that (point it out?)?
Any reference where and when she claimed to have coined it?
As far as I can tell, some press, e.g.
What fame would there be in claiming. "I coined the term X"?
If one would stand in front of me and tell me "I coined the term X" I would dismiss him as an idiot. And I'm sure so would anyone else. Regardless what X would be.
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she claims to have coined it. Any reference where and when she claimed to have coined it? As far as I can tell, some press, e.g. /., mentions that she has coined it. I'm not aware that she herself claims that, and even if she had coined it, why would she claim that (point it out?)?
How I coined the term 'open source' [opensource.com]
Christine Peterson finally publishes her account of that fateful day, 20 years ago.
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Thanx for the reference.
Then she actually is an idiot.
We used the term in my university long before it was 'coined'.
I simply could not believe that some people actually proclaim themselves as 'I coined the term'.
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If one would stand in front of me and tell me "I coined the term X" I would dismiss him as an idiot. And I'm sure so would anyone else.
Well, people are actually lining up to defend that, and to mod me a troll for behaving as you say you would behave. So alas, your surety is misplaced. Welcome to Slashdot :D
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https://opensource.org/history [opensource.org]
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The OSI has a whole section devoted to the "Coining" claim. It seems pretty important to them. You should ask them why.
...but prepare for massive downvotes when you do. BOHICA!
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The biggest Open Source organization is probably: http://apache.org/ [apache.org]
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GitHub exists because of free/libre and open source software, but primarily the former since Linux Torvalds, the creator of Linux, also created git, the software which GitHub relies heavily since its inception, hence the name GitHub.
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or are you warming up for the OSI to make a run at copyrighting the phrase?
That would be sort of hard when the US copyright law disallows the copyrighting short phrases and this backed up by the USPTO. One can get a trademark on a phrase but tyat is not the same as a copyright. If you’re going to try to sound smart at least learn something about the subject before blabbing.
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Whoops! I made that same error last time I brought this up! Of course, you're an anonymous coward, and I treat you like you're all the same person, too pathetic to even log into Slashdot, so I'd say I'm doing pretty well compared to you right now. 99% of what you do is troll and spam.
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I kind of agree with you that it was used before, but I think the point is that its widespread use started in 1998 from that meeting.
It was basically meant as a term to replace "free software" without the undesirable connotations for businesses.
The term "open source" was first proposed by a group of people in the free software movement who were critical of the political agenda and moral philosophy implied in the term "free software" and sought to reframe the discourse to reflect a more commercially minded position.[12] In addition, the ambiguity of the term "free software" was seen as discouraging business adoption.[13][14] The group included Christine Peterson, Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Michael Tiemann and Eric S. Raymond. Peterson suggested "open source" at a meeting[15] held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's announcement in January 1998 of a source code release for Navigator. Linus Torvalds gave his support the following day, and Phil Hughes backed the term in Linux Journal. [...]
Raymond was especially active in the effort to popularize the new term. He made the first public call to the free software community to adopt it in February 1998.[18] Shortly after, he founded The Open Source Initiative in collaboration with Bruce Perens.[15]
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_model#Open_source_as_a_term )
(Sheesh, Wikipedia articles feel so disjointed...)
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Jesus, are you getting treatment for your autism? Your website is the sperglordiest thing I've seen in a long time.
Also, your blog sucks.
It's time for you to cut this out, Martin (Score:5, Insightful)
Martin. There's a certain company out in San Diego that we all know, parts maker and patent troll. They are working to put royalty-bearing patents in modern standards. They are using the exact same language as you at the standards committees, telling us that "there isn't one Open Source" and then going on to tell us that Open Source should only be about copyright, and that there should be patent royalties in standards that - regardless of what they say about its being only about copyright - Open Source would then not be allowed to implement. Unfortunately, they are gaining traction in important standards committees, especially the national ones.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not working for these guys, you sound exactly like you are. What you are doing hurts both Free Software and Open Source (they are really the same). As I fly around the world to educate standards committees about the Open Source Definition and what they really need to do to accommodate Open Source in standards, they're going to be pointing at your words and using them against me.
This is really important. For medical reasons, this is probably the last decade of my life, and I am spending a good part of it to work on this issue. You're getting in the way. Cut it out. I promise that nobody can trademark the words "Open Source" today, and you are feeling threatened for nothing.
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If the existence of open source is going to depend on historical revisionism, then perhaps it is better off dead.
Re:It's time for you to cut this out, Martin (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a right to an opinion, but since your campaign currently will do damage to Free Software and Open Source you need to think about how you are conducting yourself. If we get royalty-bearing patents in standards important to Free Software and Open Source, you will have contributed to that. Don't go thinking that what you are doing is good for Free Software, it's harmful to us all.
Re:It's time for you to cut this out, Martin (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just not important that Caldera used the words once . It didn't have legs, when we started the Open Source campaign that very definitely had legs and still does today. There were undoubtably Gettysburgh Addresses before Lincoln too. Who remembers them?
This is very pedantic of you and ends up creating a social negative as I've explained. The audience thinks you're a troll - because you are being one. Rethink what you are spending time upon.
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The problem I think people are having is not that OSI did not initiate the open source movement as they claim, but that they somehow actually coined the very term "open source" as it applies to software.
The word was in use in that context long before 1998...
One can also without too much difficulty find references to the term "open source" simply by searching old *.programmer groups on usenet.
Here's a couple that I found without too much difficulty using google from 1993 [google.com] and 1996. [google.com]
Also, here's anothe
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You really are convincing me that you're working for the patent trolls.
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A shill gambit [skepticalraptor.com]? I expected better from you.
Dude, it is very, very clear the term was not coined in 1998 -- it was already in common use for at least several years before.
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Even if the premise were true, why does it seem to bother you so much ? After all, men have been receiving more praise and attention than they deserve for millenia, and that didn't seem to bother you at all.
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Which one of these ladies [duckduckgo.com] is you?
Try one of the first few rows of images in this search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Chri... [duckduckgo.com]
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Ans as usual the people making a fuss about her being female are the loud "it should just be about the code mah freeze peach" crowd, e.g. you.
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Ans as usual the people making a fuss about her being female are the loud "it should just be about the code mah freeze peach" crowd, e.g. you.
Right. I just made up the whole "focus on women in tech" thing, instead of, you know, noticing it.
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Fixed that for you.
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Fixed that for you."
I'm sure Raymond will appreciate you correcting him
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So the handful of people talking about viewable source code is an entirely different thing. (And it is literally a handful -- I can count them on the fingers on one hand.) Doesn't it seem weird to you that in the responses, nobody picks up the phrase "open source code model"? Because nobody cared if the