
5 Things We Have Forgotten About Open Source - nailer
http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/
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nailer
People seem to think otherwise, but as the article mentions, the term Open
Source was coined by the OSI and you can prove this easily:
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&ca...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1990&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Copen%20source%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BOpen%20Source%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bopen%20source%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BOpen%20source%3B%2Cc0)

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dllthomas
There is a mostly unrelated use of the term in the intelligence community, but
I have no idea the timeline.

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hNewsLover99
Here's just one pre-1998 use of the term "open source software", by Bill Joy,
at 13:50 in this 1985 interview of/report about Bill Joy, Sun and Unix 4.2 on
the Computer Chronicles:

"As for the future of Unix, he [Bill Joy] says its open source code,
versatility and ability to work on a variety of machines means it will be
popular with scientists and engineers for some time."

It's on youtube under the title, "The Computer Chronicles: UNIX (1985).

Maybe someday Google searches will include all transcripts of all videos
relevant to our searches.

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jordigh
Thanks, I honestly looked high and low for anyone calling software "open
source" before 1998. Your example is the only one I know of so far. I asked
esr, who said there were some stray mentions here and there, but he couldn't
recall anyone particularly who used the term. I also asked Bruce Perens and
Stallman, but none of them could think of anything that was called "open
source" before 1998. So, despite this one-off use of the term in this video,
it seems nevertheless true that the term was not at all in widespread use nor
widely understood.

It is also true that besides "open source" there were other ways to refer to
the software, although it was generally considered mostly unremarkable to have
source code available, because it was just the natural state of affairs to be
able to look at source code. It was only when this natural state changed that
people started to insist on consistent terminology for free software and open
source.

