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By editorial@silicon.com, 5 February 2002 17:30

COMMENT A quiet anniversary slipped past almost unnoticed this weekend. Sunday 3 February marked four years to the day since the term "open source" was coined. Since then, the impact of this "new" way of developing software has been enormous. Linux is ubiquitous across the internet, and software vendors of all shades - even Microsoft - take pride in claiming open source status for their products. Despite this, you may wonder what the significance of the anniversary is, given its birth post-dates the development of the "open source" operating system Linux by eight years. It also post-dates the development of many of the "open source" standards underpinning the internet by considerably longer. The truth of course is that the gaggle of visionary software developers who came up with the term weren't inventing anything, and weren't describing anything new. The real innovation - and lasting success of the Open Source Initiative - has been its ability to theorise it in such a way that it became acceptable, and understandable, to the wider world. Developing new theories in an open environment, and giving peers a chance to review this progress, is nothing new in the academic world rather it's the foundation upon which much of western knowledge is built. What Eric Raymond and his acolytes realised however, as described in his seminal essay the Cathedral and the Bazaar, is that the internet provided a hitherto unimaginable boost to this process, particularly in relation to the development of software. Suddenly code could be reviewed by hundreds of experts from all over the globe simultaneously, with infinitely greater powers of review. The end result, as demonstrated by software such as Linux, could be really good code. It was this realisation, more than anything else that made the businesses sit up and take notice. By putting what had been up until then a grass roots movement into terms that the suits could follow was the real success of the "open source" idea. Now, four years later, we are in a situation where Linux is seriously challenging commercial OSs in the enterprise environment - not just for web servers but increasingly for file and print servers and even desktops. And more competition can never be a bad thing. So cheers to Eric Raymond, John "maddog" Hall, Larry Augustin, Chris Peterson and all the others for the Open Source Initiative. It has provided a much-needed breath of fresh air to an industry too stuffy and complacent by far. And long may it continue.