Today, BBC posted the first of a two-part interview with Tim O’Reilly. I read the transcript, simply because I don’t have time to listen to the podcast. Tim outlines the origins of free software and, more surprisingly, the origins of open source.
Quoting Tim from the transcript:
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux said, I didn’t realise that in English free has two meanings—it has libre and gratis—that’s very confusing…Linus is from Finland and so he didn’t quite understand the nuances. We started discussing the fact that the name was possibly a problem and then Eric Raymond, who was a guy who’s done a lot of thinking about this software movement said, well I was in a meeting recently, we were talking about this same problem and we came up with this new term, open source.
Part two of the interview, about Web 2.0, will be available tomorrow.
Photo Credit: Amarand Agasi