Linus Torvalds Remembers the Days Before ‘Open Source’ | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds Remembers the Days Before ‘Open Source’

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48 pointsogcricket22 comments

This seems to be an article about the origin of the term "open source" and not about what the world was like before open source. I also found it funny that Linus' original response to the question was "I honestly don't remember".

An amazing amount of people forget what this was like and think that we've always had "open source", whatever it was called. Many will vehemently argue against the OSI definition of open source, despite them coining the term, because they're very convinced that everyone knew what open source was in 1995 and everyone used it since at least 1970.

It's important to remember this history. In a way, free software (or open source) was the only way to originally do software. You bought a machine, and the manufacturer would just give you the source code, because how could you operate the machine otherwise? People didn't even think software was copyrightable at first.

Whenever you have old people like rms mourning about the current state of software, that's because they remember what it was like when all software was free. This happened, and remembering the origins of the term "open source" is a way to memorialise that.

http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...

I have to admit that the switch from “free software” to “open source” worked on me. Early in my career I was intrigued by the idea, but couldn’t get past how “free” software was a sustainable model. I started to get it at around the same time the terminology changed.

On a related note, I heard the word shareware last week. It made me happy when I realized how long it had been since I had thought about shareware.

And what about now, how do you think that open source is good for business in ways free software is not?

I think the majority opinion, judging by the likes of gitlab, is to use some or a lot of open source to entice people to pay you for plain ol' proprietary software. Closed shell, or open core.

It looks like there's only room for one RedHat in the world, only one company who truly sells free software. As I understand it, you can pay Red Hat for access to their repos, which provide free software with source code, and nothing else. They really do plainly sell free software, but I think they call it "self-supported" or similar.

edit: I'm of course aware that RH sells support. I just don't know any other company that plainly sells free software like RH also does. I wonder why no one else even tries.

My previous reply wasn't clear. It wasn't the difference between the meanings of open source and free software that changed my mind. It was the terminology change that helped rid me of the mental image of working for free. Now I realize there is a world of difference between free and open source software, but I didn't know that at the time.

As for now, I think free software is good for business. My company works on dozens of free libraries, and it's good for our business because we end up running better code than what we could write by ourselves. When you consider whether it is "good for business", you need to consider that most businesses don't sell software. Of course GitLab and others won't ever be able to sell free software, but that doesn't mean it isn't good for business.

I have mixed feelings about open source projects that are built by single companies who sell enterprise versions. It's often handy to have them around, but I wouldn't consider contributing anything significant to them after seeing instances where PRs remain unmerged because they compete with the enterprise-version.

> Now I realize there is a world of difference between free and open source software

There isn't. It's essentially the same set of software. That's the whole point of OSI. To just rebrand it. It's like saying that there's a world of a difference between global warming and climate change, or freedom fighters and rebel insurgents.

RMS is very clear on the difference between open source and free software [1].

> The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand.

Confusion certainly has arisen over the dual meanings of "free", where the intent is to convey "unrestricted" but often "without cost" is understood. Similarly, a confusion naturally arises between what OSI may define as qualifying for the term "open source," and the plain meaning of the words which imply that when the source is open for inspection, then the project is open source. But as you see above, even when the terms are understood as their definers intend, they have very different meanings even if they describe a similar set of software, because they have very different cultural contexts and goals behind them.

[1] "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Now that I know you have that perspective, I'm curious what you meant by your previous question, "And what about now, how do you think that open source is good for business in ways free software is not?"

I think you already answered, in a way. When they called the same software by a different name, you stopped thinking that money was disallowed. You repeated that you (only?) think about what is good for business. So, yeah, OSI's rebranding worked. Same software, but focus on the business side.

Redhat and Canonical both sell support and services, not just software. I believe there are other companies of lesser size doing this as well, possibly all the way down to individuals where lines are blurred.

Redhat also sells support contracts, and (previously?) non free software as premium options.

I can always tell who doesn't understand software total cost of ownership. They always think the great cost is in creation. Long term maintainers are much harder to come by than short term job hoppers. As Linus said, BSD is great for code you don't care about.

The title is misleading. It really isn't about Linus' memories of days before "Open Source" so much as trying to figure out who coined the term.

I think the quotes in the title make it clear that it’s about the term. I’m not sure the quotes were there when you commented, for hn makes a habit of correcting titles.

I'm old enough to remember the days when saying something was "Open Source" meant, simply, we had the sources for something and could use them for our needs.

Around .. '84 / '85, there used to be these great little systems from MIPS that ran Risc/OS. Any time we'd get an update to Risc/OS, we'd spend a few days rebuilding drivers and whatnot, for our production systems - these drivers were "open source", in that they required us to compile them ourselves. (I think they were from the PROGRESS RDBMS product...)

Back in the days of USENET, any code that was posted to groups like comp.lang.c was considered 'open source' - it was just a description of the sources, whether they were available or not. There wasn't any attribution of value - whether it was free or not - just whether or not we had access to it .. or not.

Nowadays there is all sorts of stigma and hubris around the subject - but back when computers were something you had to visit in a special room designed for the purpose, all it really meant was whether we had permission to read the source - and do things with it - or not. There wasn't a commercial value assignment, really, until the mid-90's, when people realised there was immense value in open source business models (RedHat, et al.) ...

> Back in the days of USENET, any code that was posted to groups like comp.lang.c was considered 'open source'

If this were true, you should be able to find many Usenet postings that use this term to describe the software. We have the archives. The article indeed attempts this search and doesn't find it.

There is an unrelated older meaning of "open source" from "open source intelligence", but the idea that the meaning of "open source" as "source visible" was widespread before 1998 seems false. Perhaps some people had heard of it, but it was not widely understood.

Indeed, in the article, two of the Usenet hits for "open source" are "open source material", which can be disregarded as the older meaning of "open source intelligence", which means to collect data from people from things like phone books. The other hit is of dubious meaning.

Re: Usenet, I believe that the point we're both orbiting around is that for as long as source code has been 'a thing', we've had to share it among ourselves to do anything decent with it.

There is certainly an event horizon wherein computing platforms became entirely too sophisticated to support 'open source' everything - at a very early period of computing history, perhaps - but I do believe that source code has always been open. Its the fact of code going closed, multiple times, and now persistently, that is confabulating everything. I maintain this is the inverse function.

Sure, there's plenty of evidence that the attitude to share code existed and that in the beginning nobody even thought you could copyright software. But calling it "open source" is a relatively recent thing.

Like a fish in water, a lot of the "open source" world didn't realize what it was dealing with. Of course source code was open! How else could you spend hours trying to compile it properly?

I spent three days trying to get one of the very early versions of Mosaic to compile on an SGI Indy and never did get it to work. They didn't have a binary release at the time because getting that to work would be even harder.

Fortunately, the ethos has persisted, and probably will for as long as computers are useful for us, socially and otherwise. Its very easy to have a fully open source computing environment, easier than ever in fact ..

Yes and no. The things we need to have open-source, like voting machines, automotive control systems and such, are extremely closed.

What a strange article. Clearly disturbed by the values and _confusion_ with the term free, it doesn’t delve into the significant body of work that existed prior to 1998, except for a passing quote, and how such software enabled many things, including the Linux Kernel. I can only presume the ad space associated with this article is valuable because it certainly isn’t an historically interesting or accurate piece.

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