LinuxWorld: Who invited the pirates?

“In 1999, Linux became the Next Big Thing. Linux grew in market
share and mindshare, in users and in servers, in support from
hardware companies, software companies, and software vendors, in
media coverage and in stock valuation. J.S. Kelly isn’t convinced
that the people who so badly wanted Linux to become the Next Big
Thing knew precisely what they were wishing for, and thinks they
may be in for an unwelcome lesson.”

“It was almost exactly two years ago that the leaders of
what is now known as the open source community — people like Eric
Raymond, Larry Augustin, and John “Maddog” Hall — met in Palo
Alto, Calif., for what they called a “strategy session.” They
met to discuss Netscape’s then-recent Mozilla announcement, and
ended up deciding to launch a marketing and lobbying effort to
promote the corporate acceptance of open source software. They
coined the term open source itself to differentiate themselves from
the free software movement.”

“At that time, there was not yet any corporate investment in
Linux, nor had there been any IPOs — even Red Hat was yet to
receive its first round of venture capital. But commercializing
free software wasn’t a new idea even then — companies like Cygnus
and Red Hat had already been doing it for years by the time of the
Palo Alto strategy session. And for years, Bob Young had been using
the “rising tide lifts all boats” analogy to advocate this. What
was different about Palo Alto was the corporate acceptance and the
marketing campaign — which together would prove an explosive
mix.”

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