Christine Peterson holds a specific and well-documented place in FOSS history: she proposed the term "open source" at the meeting that launched the open-source-schism-and-dotcom-1998-2004.
On February 3, 1998, Peterson attended a strategy meeting at the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, convened in response to the netscape-source-release-1998. The attendees — including eric-raymond, bruce-perens, and others — were discussing how to capitalize on the Netscape announcement and make the case for free software to business audiences. The existing term "free software" was widely seen as confusing (the ambiguity between "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer") and politically loaded. Peterson suggested "open source" as a cleaner, more business-friendly alternative. The group adopted it.
Peterson was not a software developer. She had co-founded the Foresight Institute in 1986 as a nanotechnology policy organization. Her outsider perspective may have been precisely what allowed her to see the naming problem clearly — she was thinking about how to communicate to a general audience rather than how to describe the technical or philosophical reality from inside the movement.
The term "open source" spread rapidly after the Foresight meeting. The open-source-initiative was founded later that month by eric-raymond and bruce-perens to give the term institutional form and the open-source-definition a formal home.
Peterson has noted in interviews that her contribution was simple — one phrase in a meeting — and that the movement's subsequent history was built by many others. She has generally remained outside the FOSS community's ongoing debates, including the software-freedom-vs-open-source conflict, given her background in nanotechnology rather than software.