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Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source"

This is the original call to the community to start using the term‘open source‘ that I issued on 8 February 1998. The eventreferred to in the first paragraph is the 23 January announcement ofthe Mozilla source code release. Because this is a historic document,I have fixed some link drift but haven't re-styled it to match therest of my site. Though it has been converted to XHTML rather thanHTML classic, except for this gray box and the RCS date at the bottomit looks pretty much exactly as it did then. There areSpanishandIndonesiantranslations of this document.

After theNetscapeannouncement broke in January I did a lot of thinking about thenext phase -- the serious push to get "free software" accepted in themainstream corporate world. And I realized we have a serious problemwith "free software" itself.

Specifically, we have a problem with theterm "freesoftware", itself, not the concept. I've become convinced that theterm has to go.

The problem with it is twofold. First, it's confusing; the term"free" is very ambiguous (something theFree Software Foundation'spropaganda has to wrestle with constantly). Does "free" mean "nomoney charged?" or does it mean "free to be modified by anyone", orsomething else?

Second, the term makes a lot of corporate types nervous. Whilethis does not intrinsically bother me in the least, we now have apragmatic interest in converting these people rather than thumbingour noses at them. There's now a chance we can make serious gainsin the mainstream business world without compromising our idealsand commitment to technical excellence -- so it's time toreposition. We need a new and better label.

I brainstormed this with some Silicon Valley fans of Linux(including Larry Augustin of theLinuxInternational board of directors) the day after my meeting withNetscape (Feb 5th). We kicked around and discarded severalalternatives, and we came up with a replacement label we all liked:"open source".

We suggest that everywhere we as a culture have previouslytalked about "free software", the label should be changed to "opensource". Open-source software. The open-source model. The opensource culture. The Debian Open Source Guidelines. (In pitchingthis to the corporate world I'm also going to be invoking the ideaof "peer review" a lot.)

And, we should explain publicly the reason for the change. LinusTorvalds has been saying in "World Domination 101" that theopen-source culture needs to make a serious effort to take thedesktop and engage the corporate mainstream. Of course he's right-- and this re-labeling, as Linus agrees, is part of the process.It says we're willing to work with and co-opt the market for ourown purposes, rather than remaining stuck in a marginal,adversarial position.

This re-labeling has since attracted a lot of support (and someopposition) in the hacker culture. Supporters include Linushimself, John "maddog" Hall, Larry Augustin, Bruce Perens ofDebian, Phil Hughes ofLinux Journal. Opposers includeRichard Stallman, who initially flirted with the idea but nowthinks the term "open source" isn't pure enough.

Bruce Perens has applied to register "open source" as atrademark and hold it through Software in the Public Interest. Thetrademark conditions will be known as the ``Open SourceDefinition'', essentially the same as theDebianFree Software Guidelines.

It's crunch time, people. The Netscape announcement changeseverything. We've broken out of the little corner we've been in fortwenty years. We're in a whole new game now, a bigger and moreexciting one -- and one I think we can win.

(A note about usage. In accordance with normal English practice,the term is "open source" standing alone, but "open-source" used asan adjective or in compounds; thus, "open-source software".)

(Yes, we're aware of the specialized meaning "open source" hasin the intelligence community. This is a feature, not a bug.)