[samatman]

> Open Source existed long before 1998

It did not. Free software did. The term "open source" was coined by Christine Peterson at a meeting in January of 1998, as Netscape was contemplating releasing their source code as free software. The Open Source Initiative was founded a month later, and forked the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written by one of the OSI founders, Bruce Perens. This was a deliberate marketing exercise, both to avoid the unfortunate "as in beer" connotations of free software, and to distance the concept from the FSF and Richard Stallman.

All of this is well documented.

[account42]

Does something only exist once it is named? Free software is also open source software, even if that name was only coined later on.

[samatman]

We don't have to get philosophical about it, this is what the Fine Article says:

> Most of you kids probably don’t remember a time where there weren’t millions of open source projects around, but the phrase was only coined in 1998.

100% and unambiguously true.

[giantrobot]

In 1998 there definitely weren't millions of open source projects. Debian 1.3.1 (released in 1997[0]) had over two thousand packages. I pick Debian here because they only packaged software with unambiguously Open licenses. That's just packages shipped by Debian and not a full accounting of all open source software packages available in 1997. I'm sure some Walnut Creek CDs had a bunch more tarballs with more ambiguous licensing.

Open source software existed before 1998. I don't know why you're trying to quibble about the exact branding, just because the Open Source Software term wasn't coined until a certain date doesn't mean that is the start of all software with open licenses or people publicly releasing the source of their software. The GPL, MIT, and BSD licenses are all from the 80s.

[0] https://www.debian.org/News/1997/19970708

[samatman]

I'm not the one quibbling here. You are.

You said this:

> Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.

I've illustrated two things: it is not true that the term "open source" existed before 1998, and, the Fine Article's claim is, to quote it again:

> Most of you kids probably don’t remember a time where there weren’t millions of open source projects around, but the phrase was only coined in 1998.

That is, it is explicitly a claim about the phrase, meaning no possible interpretation of your expressed contradiction of the article can be correct.

All of your points could have been made without incorrectly stating that the author was wrong. In that case I would have upvoted and moved on.