Joerg Schilling wrote: > Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM> wrote: > >>>> (Please avoid the "OSS" acronym as it's overloaded, and could refer to >>>> either >>>> "Open Source Software" or "Open Sound System.") >>> If people write OSS, they mean "Open Source Software" since many years. >>> Unfortunately some people recently did start a confusion with "Open Sound >>> System." >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_System : >> OSS was created in 1992 by Hannu Savolainen >> >> Doesn't sound that recent to me, especially since the term "Open Source >> Software" wasn't created until quite a few years later. > > The OpenSource movement exists since the late 1970s and has most likely been > founded by Larry Wall.
What we now call Open Source, yes, but the term Open Source wasn't commonly used to describe it until 1998 when the Open Source Initiative was founded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software dates the first use to January 1998 - if you have evidence of widespread prior use, you should correct them. We called it "freeware", "free software", or other terms back then. And frankly, I've heard "FOSS" (Free & Open Source Software) used a lot more often than "OSS" to describe the entire class of software. In any case, this is enough pointless side chatter here, as we're just annoying everyone else on this list. -- -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
