In the spring of 1997, a group of leaders in the free software community assembled in California. This group included Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly, and VA Research president Larry Augustin, among others.
Their concern was to find a way to promote the ideas surrounding free software to people who had formerly shunned the concept. They were concerned that the Free Software Foundation’s anti-business message was keeping the world at large from really appreciating the power of free software.
At Eric Raymond’s insistence, the group agreed that what they lacked in large part was a marketing campaign, a campaign devised to win mind share, and not just market share. Out of this discussion came a new term to describe the software they were promoting: Open Source. A series of guidelines were crafted to describe software that qualified as Open Source.
Bruce Perens had laid much of the groundwork for the Open Source Definition. One of the GNU project’s state goals was to create a freely available operating system that could serve as the platform for running GNU software. In a classic case of software bootstrapping, Linux had become that platform, and Linux had been created with the help of GNU tools. Perens had headed the Debian project, which managed a distribution of Linux that included within the distribution only software that adhered to the spirit of GNU. Perens had laid this out explicitly in a document called the “Debian Social Contract.” The Open Source definition is a direct descendant of the “Debian Social Contract,” and thus Open Source is very much in the spirit of GNU.
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