I'm old enough to remember the days when saying something was "Open Source" meant, simply, we had the sources for something and could use them for our needs.<p>Around .. '84 / '85, there used to be these great little systems from MIPS that ran Risc/OS. Any time we'd get an update to Risc/OS, we'd spend a few days rebuilding drivers and whatnot, for our production systems - these drivers were "open source", in that they required us to compile them ourselves. (I think they were from the PROGRESS RDBMS product...)<p>Back in the days of USENET, any code that was posted to groups like comp.lang.c was considered 'open source' - it was just a description of the sources, whether they were available or not. There wasn't any attribution of value - whether it was free or not - just whether or not we had access to it .. or not.<p>Nowadays there is all sorts of stigma and hubris around the subject - but back when computers were something you had to visit in a special room designed for the purpose, all it really meant was whether we had permission to read the source - and do things with it - or not. There wasn't a commercial value assignment, really, until the mid-90's, when people realised there was immense value in open source business models (RedHat, et al.) ...