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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