Open Source Movement - Formalization

Formalization

Richard Stallman, a supporter of the free software movement, was one of the free software and open source movement advocates who proposed an alternative to the private models prevalent in the industry. After developing a nonproprietary operating system called GNU, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1983. For most of the 1970s and 1980s, organizations such as AT&T, with their Unix operating system initiative, have promoted a policy of shared source code.

Linus Torvalds then built upon Stallman’s development in the late 1980s and created the Linux operating system that he released under Stallman’s GNU General Public License. This enabled open source programmers to improve, modify, and develop his system.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was also instrumental in the formalization of the Open Source Movement. The OSI was founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens in February 1988 with the purpose of providing general education and advocacy of the open source label through the creation of the Open Source Definition that was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The OSI has become one of the main supporters and advocators of the open source movement.

In February 1998 the open source movement was adopted, formalized, and spearheaded by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an organization formed to market software “as something more amenable to commercial business use” The OSI owns the trademark “Open Source” The main tool they adopted for this was the Open Source Definition

The “open source” label was conceived at a strategy session that was held on February 3, 1998 in Palo Alto, California and on April 8 of the same year, the attendees of Tim O’Reilly’s Free Software Summit voted to promote the use of the term “open source”.

Overall, the software developments that have come out of the open source movement have not been unique to the computer science field, but they have been successful in developing alternatives to propriety software. Members of the open source community improve upon code and write programs that can rival much of the propriety software that is already available.

The rhetorical discourse used in open source movements is now being broadened to include a larger group of non-expert users as well as advocacy organizations. Several organized groups such as the Creative Commons and global development agencies have also adopted the open source concepts according to their own aims and for their own purposes.

The factors affecting the Open Source Movement’s legal formalization are primarily based on recent political discussion over copyright, appropriation, and intellectual property.