Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/February 3

 Today in 1998 Christine Peterson supposedly introduced the term “Open source software”. It was meant for a marketing campaign for the “Open Source“ development model, avoiding the heavy moralism of user empowerment and liberation that advocates of the older term “Free Software” uphold. It has been so successful that most software development is now at least based on Open Source, but also that user freedom is rarely a priority: When a software company's needs are the dominant criterion, the improvements to the development process are welcome, but user freedom is not a vital interest. The viral Copyleft licenses have largely been replaced by liberal license terms, most notably the MIT license. Free Software is dead, Open Source has won.