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1 Background

In 1997, Eric S. Raymond presented his revolutionary paper on software engineering, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which sought to show the engineering advantages of the approach used to write the Linux kernel.

In early 1998, Netscape Communications Corporation, working with Raymond, published the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product as free software, due to lowering profit and hard competition with the Microsoft Internet Explorer software.

A group of people interested in free software and GNU/Linux decided to introduce a new marketing term for free software, seeking to position it as business friendly and less ideologicallyAn ideology is a collection of ideas. The word ideology was coined by Count Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century to define a " science of ideas. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltansch loaded when competing with proprietary softwareProprietary software is any closed-source material which fundamentally means that the user does not control what it does or cannot study or edit the code. The Free Software Foundation defines it as any software that is not free software or is only partial. This led to creating the term Open Source and a schismThe word schism from the Greek σχισμα, schisma (from σχιζο, schizo "to split"), means a division or a split, usually in an organization. A schismatic is a person who creates or incites schism in an with Richard StallmanRichard Matthew Stallman RMS born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the Free Software movement, the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom. He invented the concept of copyleft to protect the ideals of this moveme and his Free Software FoundationFree Software Foundation FSF is a non-profit organisation founded in 1985 by Richard Stallman to support the free software movement (free as in freedom), and in particular the GNU project. From its founding until the mid-1990s FSF's funds were mostly used.

2 Successes

• The term "Open Source" achieved much press coverage from 1998 to 2000, although it was often misunderstood.
• Numerous enterprises opened to the thought of an alternative open source operating systemIn computing, an operating system OS is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and web browsers. In general, t.
• The Open Source Initiative was able to publish a number of internal Microsoft memos, the Halloween documents, that showed Microsoft was an opponent of GNU/Linux and suggested various methods of eliminate the threat of open source software. See also Embrace, extend and extinguish.