On February 9, 1998, I published the Open Source Definition and the public announcement of the Open Source Initiative that Eric Raymond and I were starting. This was the first time that the general public heard what Open Source was about. Friday, February 8 is the last day of Decade Zero of Open Source. Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary of Open Source and the start of Decade One. It's a computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero :-)

Notorious open source advocate and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond brings colorful acumen to any open source discussion. Here's how Raymond views the continually evolving open source landscape.

If you ask me who's the proudest hacker in the world, I would say that it's Eric S. Raymond. ESR, as he is often called, is a computer programmer and open source software evangelist. He is also a well-known author and has been very influential in giving the term 'hacker' a positive image.

"...In 1998, some of the people in the free software community began using the term "open source software" instead of "free software" to describe what they do. The term "open source" quickly became associated with a different approach, a different philosophy, different values, and even a different criterion for which licenses are acceptable. The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are today separate movements with different views and goals, although we can and do work together on some practical projects..."

In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memo detailing their strategy against Linux and Open source was leaked to Eric S. Raymond, who annotated it and posted it on the web. This became known as the first Halloween Document. Between 1998 and 2004 Eric posted 10 other Halloween Documents

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.

When Eric Raymond posted the first of the Halloween Documents in 1998, it marked the end of the beginning for open source. That is to say those documents demonstrated that the logical superiority of the open source development model had penetrated the most headstrong corporate skull in the proprietary software universe: Microsoft.

Eric S Raymond, one of the leaders of the Open Source world and the author of Cathedral in Bazaar has come out to defend Richard M Stallman, the father of Free Software movement who was misquoted by the press.

One of the most significant moments in the history of the modern software industry took place in 1998 when Netscape announced plans to release the source code of its browser under a license that would freely permit modification and redistribution.