Are you really pretending that OSI and the open source label itself wasn’t a reactionary movement that vilified free software principles in hopes of gaining corporate traction?

Most of us who were there remember it differently. True open source advocates will find little to refute in what I’ve said.

> True open source advocates will find little to refute in what I’ve said.

No true Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

OSI helped popularize the open source movement. They not only make it palatable to businesses, but got them excited about it. I think that FSF/Stallman alone would not have been very successful on this front with GPL/AGPL.

Like I said, honest open source advocates won’t take issue to how I framed their position.

Here’s a more important point: how far would the open source people have gotten without GCC and glibc?

Much less far than they will ever admit, in my experience.

> Most of us who were there remember it differently. True open source advocates will find little to refute in what I’ve said.

> Like I said, honest open source advocates won’t take issue to how I framed their position.

Yet you've failed to provide even a single point of evidence to back up your claim.

> "honest open source advocates"

You've literally just made this term up. It's meaningless.

It’s not a term, it’s a phrase. It means “open source advocates who are being honest about their advocacy”, in case you really need such a degree of clarification.

I’ve met honest open source advocates before and, once again, they would be unlikely to refute the fact that “open source” was invented in explicit contrast to “free software” to achieve corporate palatability.

The comment you are responding to was literally responding to a comment which validated this exact sentiment.

As to providing evidence, those of us who were there at the time don’t need any and those of you who weren’t ought to seek some. It’s not my job to link to the nearly infinite number of conversations where this obvious dynamic played out.

For some advocates, sure. I was there, too — although at the beginning of my career and not deeply involved in most licensing discussions until the founding of Mozilla (where I argued against the GNU GPL and was generally pleased with the result of the MPL). However, from ~1990, I remember sharing some code where I "more or less" made my code public domain but recommended people consider the GNU GPL as part of the README (I don't have the source code available, so I don't recall).

Your characterization is quit easily refutable, because at the time that OSI was founded, there was already an explosion of possible licenses and RMS and other GNUnatics were making lots of noise about GNU/Linux and trying to be as maximalist as possible while presenting any choice other than the GNU GPL as "against freedom".

This certainly would not have held well with people who were using the MIT Licence or BSD licences (created around the same time as the GNU GPL v1), who believed (and continue to believe) that there were options other than a restrictive viral licence‡. Yes, some of the people involved vilified the "free software principles", but there were also GNU "advocates" who were making RMS look tame with their wording (I recall someone telling me to enjoy "software slavery" because I preferred licences other than the GNU GPL).

The "Free Software" advocates were pretending that the goals of their licence were the only goals that should matter for all authors and consumers of software. That is not and never has been the case, so it is unsurprising that there was a bit of reaction to such extremism.

OSI and the open source label were a move to make things easier for corporations to accept and understand by providing (a) a clear unifying definition, and (b) a set of licences and guidelines for knowing what licenses did what and the risks and obligations they presented to people who used software under those licences.

‡ Don't @ me on this, because both the virality and restrictiveness are features of the GNU GPL. If it weren't for the nonsense in the preamble, it would be a good licence. As it is, it is an effective if rampantly misrepresented licence.