Open Source Initiative

The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software. It was founded in February 1998 by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond.

Table of contents

1 Background 2 Successes 3 Present 4 External links

Background

In 1997, Eric S. Raymond presented his revolutionary paper on software engineering, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which sought to show the engineering advantages of the approach used to write the Linux kernel.

In early 1998, Netscape Communications Corporation, working with Raymond, published the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product as free software, due to lowering profit and hard competition with the Microsoft Internet Explorer software.

A group of people interested in free software and GNU/Linux decided to introduce a new marketing term for free software, seeking to position it as business friendly and less ideologically loaded when competing with proprietary software. This led to creating the term Open Source and a schism with Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation.

Successes

• The term "Open Source" achieved much press coverage from 1998 to 2000, although it was often misunderstood.
• Numerous enterprises opened to the thought of an alternative open source operating system.
• The Open Source Initiative was able to publish a number of internal Microsoft memos, the Halloween documents, that showed Microsoft was an opponent of GNU/Linux and suggested various methods of eliminate the threat of open source software. See also Embrace, extend and extinguish.

The Open Source Initiative is still active, although not publicly visible in recent times. Its president, Eric S. Raymond, from time to time publishes comments on current community news.

External links

• Official home page