View source for Open Source Software

Open Source Software is computer software whose source code is available under a license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is often developed in a public, collaborative manner.

The term Open Source Software was chosen during a strategy session held in Palo Alto by a group that sought to encourage major software businesses to release their source code. The group met in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement that they planned to release the source code for Navigator (as Mozilla). Those present included Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Christine Peterson, and [[Eric S. Raymond]]. The term Open Source was suggested at the strategy session by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute.

The group sought to use the opportunity of the release of Navigator's source code to clarify a potential confusion caused by the ambiguity of the word "free" in English. Since a great deal of Free Software is free of charge, the term Free Software is associated with the idea of zero cost, which seems anti-commercial. The use of the term Open Source Software aimed to ease business adoption of Free Software by getting rid of the zero-cost ambiguity, and to avoid the political connotations of Free Software. Open Source Software was thus explicitly proposed as "replacement label" for Free Software.

However, the [[Free Software Foundation]] (FSF) recommends always using the term [[Free Software]] and never [[open Source Software]], due to the open source community's lack of emphasis on [[Software Freedom]].

Shortly after the strategy session, in February 1998 [[Eric S. Raymond]] and [[Bruce Perens]] formed the [[Open Source Initiative]] (OSI) to promote the term Open Source Software as part of "a marketing program for free software". Perens originally attempted to register "open source" as a service mark for the OSI, but that attempt was impractical by trademark standards. Meanwhile, thanks to the presentation of a paper by Raymond to the upper management at Netscape, Netscape released its Navigator source code as open source, with favorable results.

==Links==
*Wikipedia article on Open Source Software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

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