"We wanted
to go out with a solidarity message," O'Reilly says.
The term didn't take long to enter the national
lexicon. Shortly after the summit, O'Reilly shepherded
summit attendees to a press conference attended by
reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, and other prominent publications. Within a few
months, Torvalds' face was appearing on the cover of
Forbes magazine, with the faces of Stallman, Perl
creator Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian
Behlendorf featured in the interior spread. Open source
was open for business.
For summit attendees such as Tiemann, the solidarity
message was the most important thing. Although his
company had achieved a fair amount of success selling
free software tools and services, he sensed the
difficulty other programmers and entrepreneurs faced.
"There's no question that the use of the word free was
confusing in a lot of situations," Tiemann says. "Open
source positioned itself as being business friendly and
business sensible.
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