The Myth of Neutral Code

Christine Peterson coined the term "open source" in February 1998, and Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond soon after launched the Open Source Initiative, rebranding Richard Stallman's explicitly moral Free Software movement into a business-friendly narrative. The shift stripped out the ethical language of Stallman's 1980s GNU Project—which framed proprietary software as a threat to human freedom—to reassure corporate adopters such as IBM and Microsoft as Linux gained traction. The article argues that today's complaints about software being "radicalized" by codes of conduct and social politics misread history: the politically neutral open source era was a temporary corporate anomaly, not the movement's original DNA. What's being called radicalization is better understood as developers rediscovering the foundational politics of software liberation. The debate matters because it shapes how open source communities govern themselves and who sets their norms. Watch for how OSI-aligned projects and corporate sponsors respond as conduct and governance fights keep resurfacing.