Brief History of Open Source Software

Free Software VS Proprietary Software

It could be said that in the beginning, there was only free (libre) software. Later on, proprietary software  was  born,  and  it  quickly  dominated  the  software  landscape,  to  the  point  that  it  is today considered as the only possible model by many people. Only recently has the software industry considered free software as an option again.

When IBM and others sold the first large-scale commercial computers, in the 1960s, they came with some software which was free , in the sense that it could be freely shared among users, it came with source code, and it could be improved and modified. In the late 1960s, the situation changed  after  the  "unbundling"  of  IBM  software,  and  in  mid-1970s  it  was  usual  to  find
proprietary  software,  in  the  sense that  users  were  not  allowed  to  redistribute  it,  that  source code was not available, and that users could not modify the programs. 

Inception of Open Source Software Movement

In late 1970s and early 1980s, two different groups were establishing the roots of the current
open source software movement:

• On  the  US  East  coast,  Richard  Stallman,  formerly  a  programmer  at  the  MIT  AI  Lab, resigned,  and  launched  the  GNU  Project  and  the  Free  Software  Foundation.  The ultimate  goal  of  the  GNU  Project  was  to  build  a  free  operating  system,  and  Richard started by coding some programming tools (a compiler, an editor, etc.). As a legal tool, the  GNU  General  Public  License  (GPL)  was  designed  not  only  to  ensure  that  the
software produced by GNU will remain free, but to promote the production of more and more  free  software.  On  the  philosophical  side,  Richard  Stallman  also  wrote  the  GNU Manifesto,  "stating  that  availability  of  source  code  and  freedom  to  redistribute  and modify software are fundamental rights.”

• On the US West coast, the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) of the University of  California  at  Berkeley  was  improving  the  Unix  system,  and  building  lots  of applications  which  quickly  become  ”BSD  Unix''.  These  efforts  were  funded  mainly  by DARPA  contracts,  and  a  dense  network  of  Unix  hackers  around  the  world  helped  to debug,  maintain  and  improve  the  system.  During  many  time  that  software  was  not
redistributed outside the community of holders of a Unix AT&T licence. But in the late 1980s, it was finally distributed under the “BSD licence'', one of the first open source licences. Unfortunately, at that time every user of BSD Unix also needed an AT&T Unix licence,  since  some  parts  of  the  kernel  and  several  important  utilities,  which  were needed for a usable system, were still proprietary. Early 1990s During the 1980s and early 1990s, open source software continued its development, initially in several relatively isolated groups. USENET and the Internet helped to coordinate transnational
efforts,  and  to  build  up  strong  user  communities.  During  1991-1992,  the  whole  landscape  of open source software and of software development in general, was ready to change. Two very exciting events were taking place, although in different communities: 

• In California, Bill Jolitz was implementing the missing portions to complete the Net/2 distribution,  until  it  was  ready  to  run  on  i386-class  machines.  Bill  called  his  work 386BSD,  and  it  quickly  became  appreciated  within  the  BSD  and  Unix  communities.  It included not only a kernel, but also many utilities, making a complete operating system.

• In Finland, Linus Torvalds, a student of computer science, unhappy with Tanenbaum's Minix, was implementing the first versions of the Linux kernel. Soon, many people were collaborating to make that kernel more and more usable, and adding many utilities to complete   GNU/Linux,   a   real   operating   system.   The   Linux   kernel,   and   the   GNU applications used on top of it are covered by GPL. 

1990s – The Golden Period

In 1993, both GNU/Linux and 386BSD were reasonably stable platforms. Since then, 386BSD has evolved into a family of BSD based operating systems (NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD), while the  Linux  kernel  is  healthy  evolving  and  being  used  in  many  GNU/Linux  distributions Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and many more). 

During  the  1990s,  many  open  source  projects  have  produced  a  good  quantity  of  useful  (and usually high-quality) software. Some of them are Apache (widely used as a WWW server), Perl(an   interpreted   language   with   lots   of   libraries),   XFree86   (the   most   widely   used   X11
implementation for PC-based machines), GNOME and KDE (both providing a consistent set of libraries and applications to present the casual user with an easy to use and friendly desktop environment),  Mozilla  (the  free  software  project  funded  by  Netscape  to  build  a  WWW browser), etc. Of all these projects, GNOME and KDE are especially important, because they address usability by non-technical people.

The  late  1990s  are  very  exciting  times  with  respect  to  open  source  software.  Open  source systems based on GNU/Linux or *BSD are gaining public acceptance, and have become a real alternative  to  proprietary  systems,  competing  head  to  head  with  the  market  leaders  (like Windows NT in servers). In many niches, the best choice is already open source (an outstanding case is Apache as Web server, with a market share consistently over 50%).