[hNewsLover99]

Here's just one pre-1998 use of the term "open source software", by Bill Joy, at 13:50 in this 1985 interview of/report about Bill Joy, Sun and Unix 4.2 on the Computer Chronicles:

"As for the future of Unix, he [Bill Joy] says its open source code, versatility and ability to work on a variety of machines means it will be popular with scientists and engineers for some time."

It's on youtube under the title, "The Computer Chronicles: UNIX (1985).

Maybe someday Google searches will include all transcripts of all videos relevant to our searches.

[jordigh]

Thanks, I honestly looked high and low for anyone calling software "open source" before 1998. Your example is the only one I know of so far. I asked esr, who said there were some stray mentions here and there, but he couldn't recall anyone particularly who used the term. I also asked Bruce Perens and Stallman, but none of them could think of anything that was called "open source" before 1998. So, despite this one-off use of the term in this video, it seems nevertheless true that the term was not at all in widespread use nor widely understood.

It is also true that besides "open source" there were other ways to refer to the software, although it was generally considered mostly unremarkable to have source code available, because it was just the natural state of affairs to be able to look at source code. It was only when this natural state changed that people started to insist on consistent terminology for free software and open source.

[dllthomas]

While the token string appears, I'm not sure I would call that a use of "open source". It reads to me like "open" modifies "source code", rather than "open source" modifying "code".