Christine Peterson

Works

Open Source Software

As reported on Slashdot, she coined the term on February 3, 1998:

Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending – in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me – were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive – a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic – just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened...

Toward the end of the meeting, the question of terminology was brought up explicitly, probably by Todd or Eric. Maddog mentioned "freely distributable" as an earlier term, and "cooperatively developed" as a newer term. Eric listed "free software," "open source," and "sourceware" as the main options. Todd advocated the "open source" model, and Eric endorsed this... Eric Raymond was far better positioned to spread the new meme, and he did. Bruce Perens signed on to the effort immediately, helping set up Opensource.org and playing a key role in spreading the new term... By late February, both O'Reilly & Associates and Netscape had started to use the term. After this, there was a period during which the term was promoted by Eric Raymond to the media, by Tim O'Reilly to business, and by both to the programming community. It seemed to spread very quickly.'

Books

In 1991 she coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution with Gayle Pergamit and Eric Drexler, which sketches nanotechnology's potential environmental and medical benefits as well as possible abuses. In 1997 she coauthored Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work with Gayle Pergamit.

Articles

• "Thinking Longer Term about Technology", 2009.

References

References

1. "Christine Peterson Biography".
2. Johnson, Dexter. (15 February 2013). "Christine Peterson Looks into the Future of Nanotechnology".
3. "History of the OSI | Open Source Initiative".
4. (2006). "Technology In Government, 1/e". Jaijit Bhattacharya.
5. comments, 01 Feb 2018 Christine Peterson Feed 935up 20. "How I coined the term 'open source'".
6. [https://www.foresight.org/about/Peterson.html Officers and Staff: Christine Peterson – Co-Founder & Past President], Foresight Institute. Accessed 4 February 2018.
7. Nicole Weinstock. (2017). "Member Profile: Christine Peterson". Cryonics.
8. [[Eric Drexler]] and Chris Peterson (with Gayle Pergamit), ''[https://www.foresight.org/UTF/Unbound_LBW/index.html Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution]'', Morrow, 1991. Accessed 4 February 2018.
9. Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit, ''[https://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/99Gathering/lta_toc.html Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work]'', knOwhere Press, 1997. Accessed 4 February 2018.
10. Christine Peterson. (22 May 2008). "Presenting Futures: Presenting futures [electronic resource]". Springer.