[COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released

[Andy Kosela]

On 7/18/21, David Arnold <davida at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> David Arnold
> 0487 183 494
>> On 18 Jul 2021, at 13:30, Grant Taylor via COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> On 7/16/21 10:09 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
>>> You can try to argue that it should have a different etymology
>>
>> I'm not trying to argue anything.
>>
>> If anything, I'm sharing what I think is a different / an alternate
>> understanding.
>>
>> I view "open source" (case insensitive) as having two different
>> definitions, much like "hacker" has two almost diametrically opposed
>> definitions depending which community you're in.
>>
>> The dualism exists, and I believe that there's nothing that I can do to
>> change that.  So why try?
>
> That horse bolted when the Open Source folks claimed their definition..
>
> “Open” was a widely used term at the time, with Open Systems in particular
> being a thing complete with history, corporate good will, conferences and
> magazines and so on.  It was particularly valuable as the respectable
> corporate face of Unix (vs the feared hairy hacker).
>
> The attempt to leverage/hijack that to make the hairy hackers’ Free Software
> corporately palatable has eclipsed the uncapitalized sense of the term.
> Very few people distinguish the two, and so your meaning will often be lost.

But it is always the winners who write the history books, so it is
going to be exactly the opposite -- the open source (uncapitalized)
meaning will be lost.  We are probably one of the last communities on
the Net that still distinguish the two and know our history.

The average modern young citizen of the Net even if he is computer
savvy will know nothing about it.  He might know how to program in
Rust or run Kubernetes, but will know nothing about the "open source"
practices of the ancients.  But he is definitely familiar with GPL and
Open Source movement.

A lot of it has to do with the global spread of Internet when
dispersed communities were joined together.  The popularity of Linux
and in consequence Open Source is directly connected with this
Internet revolution that took place in the 90s.  It was also the
international revolution.  Before 1989 it would be hard to imagine
that a young student from Finland could jumpstart such a global
movement.

--Andy