“Open Source software, what a beautiful name, it truly captures
the essence of free software. It sort of explains itself without
needing a free beer, free speech add-on and it feels fresh and
exciting. Or so it seemed to me and probably a lot of others when
Eric Raymond started the Open Source Initiative.”
“Netscape was planning to release the source code of their
browser after reading Mr. Raymonds essay, and I felt certain a
revolution was underway. Think we would soon be able to cut’n paste
all interesting source code from Netscape into our own software
projects, we would be able to get it to integrate much better with
our desktop environments and other applications. And never again
would we be left with a bug ridden binary unable to take action.
And this would just be the beginning, this was the sign of a tidal
wave which would cause most software to be released under the
(L)GPL or a Berkeley style license.”
“How wrong and how naive. Soon the Netscape browser was released
under the NPL. There was some critical voices, but they drowned in
the jubilant cries as we felt we had won our first big victory. How
true and how false it would turn out to be.”