On February 3, 1998, a strategy meeting was held at the offices of the Foresight Institute in Los Altos, California. Convened in response to netscape-source-release-1998 the previous month, the meeting brought together key figures in the hacker and free software communities to discuss how to capitalize on the moment: how to communicate what Netscape had done to business audiences and mainstream press in terms they could understand and find credible.
The Coining of "Open Source"
During the meeting, christine-peterson proposed the term "open source software" as a replacement for "free software." Peterson, a nanotechnology researcher and co-founder of the Foresight Institute, had been thinking about the terminology problem: the English word "free" was ambiguous between "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer," causing persistent confusion when the term was used in business contexts. "Open source" described the defining technical characteristic — publicly available source code — without the ideological connotations that made "free software" difficult to pitch to corporate audiences.
Peterson's account of the coining is the canonical version: she had thought of the term before the meeting and proposed it there. Other attendees have confirmed this account. The term was not universally embraced on the spot — multiple alternatives were considered — but it gained rapid consensus among those present and spread quickly through the community in the days that followed.
Attendees
The meeting included eric-raymond, bruce-perens, tim-oreilly, christine-peterson, and others (the full attendee list is not comprehensively documented). This was a self-selected group of people who shared the pragmatic orientation toward free software — emphasizing its development methodology benefits rather than its ethical dimensions. richard-stallman was not present and rejected the new terminology.
Immediate Aftermath
Within days of the meeting, the new term was being used in communications and advocacy. eric-raymond sent email to key figures proposing the term and seeking buy-in. A Netscape press release on February 22, 1998 used the term "open source," one of the earliest major-media appearances. The open-source-initiative was founded in late February 1998 — within weeks of this meeting — by eric-raymond and bruce-perens, with the explicit purpose of promoting the new term and maintaining the open-source-definition.
Stallman's Rejection and the Schism
richard-stallman has consistently and publicly rejected the "open source" terminology since 1998, arguing that it omits the essential ethical dimension: the point is not that source code is available to inspect, but that users have the freedom to run, copy, modify, and distribute software. In Stallman's framing, "open source" is a development methodology claim; "free software" is an ethical claim. The terminological choice is not neutral: it reflects whether one believes the point of the movement is user freedom or collaborative development.
The Foresight meeting is thus the moment at which the software-freedom-vs-open-source tension became institutional. Before February 3, 1998, there was one movement with internal tensions. After it, there were two camps with different terms, different institutional homes (free-software-foundation vs. open-source-initiative), and different framings of the same practices.