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redhat.com is Promoting Revisionism and Lies Regarding the Origin of the Term "Open Source"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 08, 2024

Christine Peterson

This was published a few days ago:

On February 5 1998, there was a meeting at VA Research of IT workers looking to promote free software as an approach to improving software security and reliability. In this meeting, Christine Peterson, with support from Todd Anderson, formally proposed to influential technologists the term “open source” for software that made its source code available for review, modification, and sharing.

This needs correcting. We wrote about this myth many times in the past, as the term predates this meeting and it is very trivial to demonstrate this. She wrongly claimed that she had coined it as recently as 2018:

How I coined the term 'open source'

What she wrote there 6 years ago was debunked many times before, including as recently as months ago.

Despite comment censorship by Red Hat in the above site, a couple of comments made it through which politely disputed what she had claimed.

I think Nathanael is right. Caldera is the true 'coiner' of the term open source in 1996.

We've seen even lengthier and stronger rebuttals, even this year and last year. When we published Debian-Private archives from before 1998 they also contained the term she claims that she "coined" years later.

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