The term Open Source was coined by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute in March 1998 after Netscape released the source code for their Navigator-browser thus starting the Mozilla project. Open Source is a description of software that is distributed as source code under licences that guarantee everyone the right to freely use, change, or redistribute the source code. For a precise definition please see the Open Source Definition.
The primary influence leading to the release of the source code for the Netscape browser was Eric S. Raymond's now classic paper The Cathedral And The Bazaar about the Linux development model. It is a great text on the philosophy and practises of Open Source that originally sparked my interest in the movement.
Eric S. Raymond's other papers on Open Source are also worth reading:
Homesteading The Noosphere is a paper on the customs of the Open Source society defining the hacker culture as a gift culture.
The Magic Cauldron is Raymond’s attempt to analyse the economics of Open Source.
You can find the rest of Eric Raymond’s writings here.
I have translated The Cathedral And The Bazaar, Homesteading The Noosphere, and The Magic Cauldron with Ole Michaelsen og Peter Brixen. You can find the translations in the frame on the left.
The concept of Open Source is somewhat in opposition to Free Software Foundation and Richard M. Stallman. Stallman is an ideologist concerned primarily with freedom and he disapproves of the ideas of Open Source. Stallman is the towering giant of free software. He is the principal author of GNU Emacs and the GNU C Compiler. You should definitely read Sam Williams’ excellent Stallman biography. Without Stallman Linux would most likely not have been nor any other piece of free software – whatever your preferred definition of free software is.
While I have the greatest respect for what Stallman has accomplished, I, however, think that Stallman with his extreme focus on freedom is doing the free software movement a disservice.
Yochai Benkler has written an interesting article about free software as only one example of much broader socio-economic phenomenon. Coase’s Pengiun, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (pdf) is being published in the Yale Law Journal.
Matt Asay wrote this analysis of the GPL called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Market: Linux, the General Public License, and a New Model for Software Innovation (pdf) for professor Larry Lessing at Stanford University.
The Danish Board of Technology report on open source software has been translated into English. The report shows savings in the order of several billion DKK every year in the public sector.
You can read more about Open Source at the website of the Open Source Initiative.
