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Christine Peterson Coined "Open Source" in 1998, Then Let Todd Anderson Drop It Into a Meeting
The Open Source Initiative credits Foresight Institute's Christine Peterson with the term. Her own account says she kept quiet at the February 1998 meeting while Todd Anderson used it in passing and the room picked it up.
The problem Peterson wanted to fix was a word. In her account, written in 2006 and published by Opensource.com in 2018, she says “those new to the term “free software” assume it is referring to the price.” Explaining it meant the old line “free as in freedom, not free as in beer,” every time.
The opening came with Netscape. “On February 2, 1998, Eric Raymond arrived on a visit to work with Netscape,” she wrote. She asked to get on a call with Raymond and the others “so I could bring up the need for a new term,” and “they agreed in principle immediately, but no specific term was agreed upon.”
She already had a candidate. “I ran it by at least four others,” she wrote, naming Eric Drexler, Mark Miller and Todd Anderson, who liked it, and a marketing friend who didn’t. “In hindsight, I should have simply proposed it to Eric Raymond, but I didn’t know him well at the time, so I took an indirect strategy instead.”
The indirect strategy played out “on February 5, 1998,” when “a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy.” Peterson, not a coder herself, held back: “I felt that it wouldn’t work for me to just blurt out, “All you technical people should start using my new term.”” She added, “I still had low status in this group.”
Todd Anderson did it for her. “He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic—just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened,” she wrote. “A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing.” By the end, “Todd advocated the “open source” model, and Eric endorsed this,” while she “didn’t say much.”
The name spread fast. “On April 7, 1998, Tim O’Reilly held a meeting” of free software leaders; “announced in advance as the first “Freeware Summit,” by April 14 it was referred to as the first “Open Source Summit.”” The OSI says it “was jointly founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens in late February 1998,” and that its Open Source Definition “was originally derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines,” a draft Perens wrote, adapted “by revising the DFSG and removing Debian-specific references.”
The two accounts don’t agree on the date. The OSI places the strategy session on “February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California,” while Peterson places the VA Research meeting on February 5 and marks February 3 as “the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the term.” Whether anyone used the phrase for software before 1998 is also open: her article’s editors note that earlier use “has not been confirmed.”
Words that win in software tend to be the ones a newcomer can repeat correctly the first time, and they usually spread by people using them before anyone votes on them. The next category name, for AI models with released weights or for whatever comes after, will probably settle the same way: someone uses it in a sentence, someone else repeats it without noticing, and within weeks the summit has a new name.