What's the earliest reference to open source anyone knows? I found
this in a 1965 paper:
The Multics system will be published when it is operating
substantially, and will therefore be available for implementation
on any equipment with suitable characteristics. Such publication
is desirable for two reasons: First, the system should withstand
public scrutiny and criticism volunteered by interested readers;
second, in an age of increasing complexity, it is an obligation to
present and future system designers to make the inner operating
system as lucid as possible so as to reveal the basic system
issues.
(From: Corbato and Vyssotsky, `Introduction and Overview of the
MULTICS system' proc. fall joint computer conference,
1965. http://www.multicians.org/fjcc1.html )
(Oh, and the Mulicts system *is* published: see
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
Mind you, even though the intention was for the source to be
open-source, the development process was closed-source, and ran very
very late... so th source wasn;t released until 1999, 15 years after
development stopped...)
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