[xorcist]

You can accuse the OSI of many things, but not skipping on their homework. They deliberately chose a phrase that had no recorded previous use in neither trade press or academia, for a specific purpose.

That doesn't mean nobody ever put the two words together before, only that they did a reasonable job to make it probable that no one could point to it as an established term. The whole idea was to trademark and protect the term, which would have been useless process had they not done their homework.

That fell through because the phrase was too generic, but the whole process was very open and well argued, in my opinion. If you have objections to the term, why did you not put them forward in 1998? It sounds a bit late to argue that the term was hijacked 25 years after the fact.

[googlryas]

>They deliberately chose a phrase that had no recorded previous use in neither trade press or academia, for a specific purpose.

Here's Caldera using the term "open source" for a specific purpose, to describe their DOS offerings as "source available" in 1996[1], which does not fit the definition of "Open Source". Two years later, according to OSI, Bruce Perens proposed "Open Source" as a replacement term for "Free Software"[2]. The Caldera example is just an easy to find public, widely read announcement which uses the term open source in a common-English sort of way. There are more, especially if you troll around old comp.* newsgroups.

> If you have objections to the term, why did you not put them forward in 1998?

I suppose because I was 12 and just learning C at the time. Though I do recall liking the "Free Software" term better, coupled with the phrase "Free as in freedom, not free as in beer".

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180402143912/http://www.xent.c...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...

[xorcist]

Perens did not propose the term. It had seen some use in the same circles. The document you link to supports this. Perens, Raymond and O'Reilly was probably the largest influencers in spreading it however.

The use you have found by Caldera, which just had become a Linux company at the time, likely precedes this however. I think that falls under "putting the two words together", as it was not an established term at the time.

There is simply no denying that the people around the OSI and related organizations (there were many, but mostly with people in the same circles) popularized the term and give it a specific meaning. Trying to deduce a historical event by cherry picking newsgroup messages is hard. Better to ask anyone who was around Linux related circles at the time. Being 12 at the time is certainly no guarantee of anything, there are many 12-year-olds that know more than adults, especially at the time when there was such a social explosion from the Internet, and many people were just known by their nicknames.

The situation around open source was really interesting as a social commentary at the time. A lot has been written about the connotations around "free" being problematic in English, but there was so much cultural values around the FSF, and my personal feeling (of which I have no proof) was that it was even more important to find a term that the FSF didn't own, thereby taking control over the discourse around permissionless software development which was just getting started at the time.