The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software. It was founded in February 1998 by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond.

Table of contents

1 Background 2 Successes 3 Present 4 Weblinks

Background

In early 1998 the Netscape corporation published the source code for its Netscape Navigator flagship product 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 as less ideologically laden when competing with proprietary software. This lead to the creating of the Open Source term and a schism with Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation.

Successes

• The Open Source term was largely used in the press from 1998 to 2000, but was often misunderstood.
• Numerous enterprises opened to the thought of an alternative Open Source operating system.
• The Open Source Initiative was able to publish a number of internal Microsoft memos that cleary indicated Microsoft being an opponent of GNU/Linux as well as thoughts about dirty business methods to get rid of Open Source Software.

Present

The Open Source Initiative is still active. In the last couple of months (2003), it is less publicly visible. Its President, Eric Raymond, from time to time publishes comments on current community news.

Weblinks

• Website of the Open Source Initiative, http://www.opensource.org/