The phrase “open source” was deliberately chosen at a specific moment. According to the Open Source Initiative’s own history, the label originated at a strategy session held on February 3, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, called shortly after Netscape announced it would release the source code of its browser. The attendees saw that announcement as an opening to promote the free software development method to a wider, more commercial audience.
What the group wanted was a name. OSI’s history records that they sought “a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free source.’” The motivation was strategic rather than ideological: the existing term “free software” was widely misread as meaning zero cost, and its association with explicitly political framing was seen as an obstacle to corporate adoption.
The specific term came from Christine Peterson, who is credited by OSI with originally suggesting “open source.” The meeting drew a notable group of free software figures, including Eric Raymond and Michael Tiemann, who would both later serve as OSI presidents, along with Todd Anderson, Jon “maddog” Hall, Larry Augustin, and Sam Ockman. The label was adopted quickly and began to spread.
Events moved fast in the weeks that followed. Bruce Perens, in his firsthand account, notes that Eric Raymond had approached him with the idea for open source and that he edited the Debian Free Software Guidelines into the Open Source Definition, with the original announcement made on February 9, 1998. By the end of the month Raymond and Perens had founded the Open Source Initiative to carry the label and the definition forward.
The coining of “open source” was not a technical breakthrough but an act of framing, and it succeeded. Within a few years the term had become the standard industry vocabulary, and the Palo Alto meeting is remembered as the moment a development practice acquired the name under which it would reshape the software business.