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. Raymond was president from its founding until February 2005; Russ Nelson replaced him for one month, but after some controversy he resigned and Michael Tiemann bacame interim president.

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 eliminating the threat of open source software. See also Embrace, extend and extinguish.

Present

The Open Source Initiative is still active.

References

• Open-source leader steps aside at industry group (Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com, 1st February 2005)

External link

• Official home page