Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyanHamilton | Hacker News Reader

OSI isn't the software industry. It's sponsored by Google, amazon then ms via github in order of sponsor donations. It's financed by the hyperscalars. https://opensource.org/sponsors

View on HN

This is such a crazy retelling of history that it's hard to take seriously. Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors -- namely Microsoft and Oracle, and to prevent people from imposing their will on users via software in a manner that users had no possible redress from.

OSI was founded by Perens and Raymond and very much represents the interests of the wider software industry. You're free to argue that at some point they have stopped in recent but Open Source has meant the same thing for going on 30 years.

OSI is from 1998 so it’s much younger than the open source movement. BSD was approaching 20 and Linux was what 7 years old at that point?

The free software movement is for sure older than that but I can't find any verifiable source of "open source" being used in its current form earlier than the 90's.

The term still predates OSI, but more importantly than the name than what was going on.

The specific transition from sharing as public-domain software vs free, open, shared, and permissivly licenced software dates to ~1953 with A-2 being provided for free and requesting updates be sent back to UNIVAC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System Others might point to IBM SHARE from 1955 as being closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)

Followed by many similar arrangements before the term open source was coined with OSI only showing up much later.

No, because it's a name that was made up then to try to rebrand something that had already existed for decades, but which has a name that those guys didn't like.

My memory from the time was that the OSI was mostly about trying to characterise the various licenses that were floating around, and about legitimising the use of freeish software in industry.

Today the majority of free software that I use seems to be Apache/BSD/MIT - and GPL for Linux - but back in the 90s everyone seemed to make up their own “free” license, and there was a lot of confusion around GPL. My recollection is that OSI was trying to create some clarity around which licenses really were “free”, and which weren’t.

I was just a passive observer, I was not involved in any way, I wasn’t a fan of some of the players, and I even thought calling it OSI was pretentious - but nevertheless they made a dent in the universe by popularising the term “open source”. OSI was far more than a rebranding because it enabled us to speak about GPL - which imposes conditions on use - and free licenses like BSD in the same breath, while excluding what we now call “source available” licenses.

So despite my misgivings, I think the OSI deserves credit. They stood up and did something meaningful, and helped move the entire software industry forward.

Because of this, I think calling it a rebranding is totally unjustified and unfair.

GPL does not impose conditions on use.

Sure it does. If you modify GPL code, you have to give your changes back in some circumstances.

If you modify it and don’t give your changes back, you can be sued.

> Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors

No, you are thinking of Free Software and copyleft, which predates Open Source.

Open Source was invented as an alternative to Free Software.

Please reread my post, I didn't mention anything historical. I never said who founded it nor who started it. Your arguing against a straw man argument you made up. I am saying today, OSI does not represent the software industry and that given sponsorship bias it's likely to represent the views of those companies that pay OSI.

Bloomberg, Capital One, Cisco, Intel, Meta and Red Hat all are sponsoring at the same level as GitHub. FerretDB, Perforce, Tidelift and Salesforce join Microsoft at the next level down.

That's a much more diverse crowd of sponsors than I thought I'd see based on your comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com