State of Open Source Message: A New Decade For Open Source

"On February 9, 1998, I published the Open Source Definition and the public announcement of the Open Source Initiative that Eric Raymond and I were starting. This was the first time that the general public heard what Open Source was about. Friday, February 8 is the last day of Decade Zero of Open Source. Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary of Open Source and the start of Decade One. It's a computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero :-)

"Of course, 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.

"And that brings me to our first mistake: for a time, there was a conflict between Open Source and Free Software evangelism..."

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