The Open Source Movement of 1998: Netscape, OSI and a New Name
In 1998 Netscape released its browser code and a group coined the term open source. Read how this changed software and why it matters to website owners.
In early 1998, two events turned the practice of sharing source code into a movement with a name. A famous company opened up its main product, and a small group of programmers and advocates met to decide how to describe what they were doing so that businesses would listen. The result was the term "open source", which is now used in almost every corner of technology.
Free software before the label
Sharing source code was older than the label. Researchers had traded programs since the 1950s and 1960s. The GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, from 1983 and 1985, framed code sharing as a moral cause. Projects such as the BSD versions of Unix, Apache, Perl and Linux were thriving by the mid-1990s. But the word "free" confused many business people, who heard "no cost" rather than "freedom", and many were uneasy with an ideological argument.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
In 1997, Eric S. Raymond presented an essay titled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". It compared two models of software development. The cathedral model had a small group of developers working in private and releasing finished versions. The bazaar model, which he associated with Linux, released early and often, with many contributors reviewing and testing. One of his best-known lines of reasoning was that with enough people looking at the code, most bugs become easy to find. The essay was widely read and later published in book form in 1999. Its argument gave business readers a practical reason to take open development seriously.
Netscape opens its code
By 1998, Netscape was losing the browser competition with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. On 22 January 1998 the company announced that it would release the source code of its Navigator browser for free. Netscape's leaders cited Raymond's ideas as one influence. The code was published in March 1998, and the Mozilla project was formed to coordinate the work. It took years to turn the old code into a modern product, but the effort eventually produced Firefox. It also showed large companies that releasing source code was possible.
Palo Alto and the new term
On 3 February 1998, soon after the Netscape announcement, a group met in Palo Alto, California, including Raymond, Christine Peterson, who is credited with proposing the phrase, and others from the free software and Linux communities. They concluded that a new term was needed that would avoid the ambiguity of "free". They chose open source.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was set up shortly after by Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond to promote the term and to certify licences. The Open Source Definition, derived from Debian's guidelines, lists criteria that a licence must meet. These include free redistribution, source code availability and permission for derived works.
Free software or open source?
| Aspect | Free software | Open source |
|---|---|---|
| Emphasis | User freedom as an ethical principle | Practical benefits of open development |
| Main organisation | Free Software Foundation | Open Source Initiative |
| Licences covered | Largely the same in practice | Largely the same in practice |
In practice, nearly all software in one category is also in the other, and many people use the combined term FOSS or FLOSS. The difference is mostly one of philosophy.
What followed
The late 1990s and 2000s saw open source move into the mainstream. IBM announced major investment in Linux in 2000, and companies built businesses around support and services for open-source products. Databases, programming languages, web servers and browsers were all available as open source. Today, large parts of cloud infrastructure are built on open-source projects, and the term "open source" is used well beyond software, for example in open data and open hardware.
Why it matters for your site
- Lower costs. Core tools such as the operating system, web server, database and many content systems cost nothing to license.
- Portability. Open formats and standard software make it practical to change providers.
- Transparency. Anyone can inspect the code for flaws, and fixes are published openly.
- Responsibility. The flip side is that you need to apply updates, since fixes only help once installed.
Open source in your own site
The practical side of this history is that you probably already depend on open source. Your CMS, your server software and many of your site's scripts come from open projects. Keeping them up to date is your side of the arrangement. If you want to see which hosting setups suit the software you use, our WordPress hosting page describes the environment in detail.
Open source also reduced the cost of experimenting. A person with an idea in 1995 had to buy server software and a database licence; by 2005, they could build a prototype using free tools on a low-cost plan. This is part of the reason why so many small businesses and agencies now exist around open-source platforms.
The lesson for site owners
When you pick open-source software for your site, you are also picking a community, so look at how active it is and how quickly it ships security updates. A good host handles the server side so that you can concentrate on the site. Zebra Hosting plans run the open-source stack with Plesk, and our hosting plans include free SSL and migration help for sites you already run elsewhere.
