Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
'Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.
The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us.
The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.
In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
I related to the whole hippie, acid-test confluence of the early Internet. The idea that we should be open and interoperate with our data resonated with me.
Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.
While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'
I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.
Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.
Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. They will not be aware that we have ideas, that a system exists because of ethical ideals, which were omitted from ideas associated with the term 'open source.'
There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.
I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.
