[falcolas]

Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source.

The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines."

The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't see articles like the "Pay Me or Fork This" post from earlier this morning.

[alangibson]

I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it.

Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.

[falcolas]

It's worth reading into the history of OSS. There was a bit of sharing going on in the early 70's, but it was all being locked down before Richard Stallman and his contemporaries created the modern OSS movement via the GNU project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

[autarch]

The term "free software" predates "open source" by many years. Stallman started work on free software (the movement and the code) many, many years before Eric S Raymond coined the term "open source".

[alangibson]

It's about the sharing of code, whatever label you put on it. Terminology usually lags behind practice.

[autarch]

The terms "free software" and "open source" were created very deliberately to express different values. The conflict between those values has been the source of a lot of contention in the past. Nowadays there's less of that, probably because as the industry grows, the proportion of developers who are old enough to remember this stuff is going down.

[carapace]

No, you could always share your code, "Open" source adds nothing to that.

"Free" software is about preventing technology lock-in. As in "I'll share with you but only if you agree to share with me."