Development based on the sharing and collaborative improvement of software source code has a history essentially as long as software development itself. In the late 1990s, interest and participation in this phenomenon increased markedly with mainstream recognition of Linux in publications like Forbes and the release of the Netscape browser’s source code.
OSI was formed in 1998 as an educational, advocacy, and stewardship organization at this important moment in the history of collaborative development.
Coining “Open Source”
The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code. The strategy session grew from a realization that the attention around the Netscape announcement had created an opportunity to educate and advocate for the superiority of an open development process.
Two of those present at the Palo Alto meeting (Eric Raymond and Michael Tiemann) would later serve as presidents of OSI, and other attendees (including Todd Andersen, Jon “maddog” Hall, Larry Augustin, and Sam Ockman) became key early supporters of the organization.
Adoption of the term was swift, with early support from figures in the community, like Linus Torvalds, and from an April 1998 Free Software Summit attended by many key individuals, including the founding figures of sendmail, Perl, Python, Apache, and representatives from the IETF and Internet Software Consortium.
Founding The Organization
OSI was jointly founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens in late February 1998, with Raymond as its first president, Perens as vice-president, and an initial Board of Directors including Brian Behlendorf, Ian Murdock, Russ Nelson, and Chip Salzenberg.
OSI was conceived as a general educational and advocacy organization to execute the same mission agreed on at the Free Software Summit held in April 1998. At the launch meeting, the original Board accepted this general mission and decided to focus specifically on explaining and protecting the "open source" label. Some early activism was done as well, with OSI supporting a petition to encourage the US government to use open source software in Jan. of 1999.
Assessing Licenses
One of the first tasks undertaken by OSI was to draft the Open Source Definition (OSD), and use it to begin creating a list of OSI-approved licenses.
The Open Source Definition was originally derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Bruce Perens had composed the original draft of the DFSG, and it was edited, refined, and approved as formal policy by the Debian developer community in 1997. The Open Source Definition was then created during the launch of the OSI in Feb. 1998 by revising the DFSG and removing Debian-specific references.
By Oct. 1999, OSI had published its first formal list of approved licenses. The OSI license list, updated many times since then, has remained the canonical list of open source licenses and is referred to by many third parties, including governments and standards bodies.
In 2004 the OSI added clause 10 to the OSD to deal with some issues surrounding click-wrap licensing. Otherwise the OSD has been stable since its inception, with only minor wording clarifications in other clauses.
Also in 2004, due to a marked increase in the number of open source licenses, OSI launched a campaign to reduce the growth in the number of open source licenses. This resulted in the 2006 publication of a License Proliferation report, and recategorization of the license list into groupings of licenses based on usage as well as content. OSI’s report and process helped bring wider awareness to the overall problem of license proliferation and reduce the creation and use of new licenses.
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