Christine Peterson is a nanotechnology researcher and co-founder of the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit focused on molecular nanotechnology. She is best known in the software world for coining the term "open source software" at a strategy session held at VA Research on February 5, 1998.
The context was the decision to rebrand free software for business audiences following netscape-mozilla-open-source-1998. Netscape had announced it would release the source code to its Navigator browser on January 22, 1998, and a group of technologists — including eric-raymond, bruce-perens, john-gilmore, and others — convened to discuss how to market this development to the corporate world. Peterson proposed "open source" as a term that would avoid the perceived ambiguity of "free" (free as in price vs. free as in freedom) and make the concept more palatable to business. The term was adopted at that meeting.
Peterson served as President of the Foresight Institute for many years. She later published her own account of the coinage in a 2018 article for Opensource.com, "How I coined the term 'open source'."
From stallman's perspective, Peterson's coinage represents a deliberate strategic retreat. His argument, developed extensively in why-open-source-misses-the-point, is that "open source" focuses on the practical benefits of source availability while dropping the essential ethical claim that software freedom is a matter of users' rights. The software-freedom-vs-open-source distinction is one of the central tensions of the free-vs-open-source-schism-1998-2007 era. The open-source-initiative formed shortly after, with eric-raymond and bruce-perens as its public faces, institutionalizing the rebranding that Peterson's coinage initiated.
Peterson's own account emphasizes pragmatic communication strategy rather than philosophical disagreement with Stallman — she was seeking a term that would open corporate doors, not staking out a rival ideology. But the term took on that role regardless.