Open Source History

The Revival

He left MIT in 1984 to the start the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, saying that id he stayed on, he “knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place”. RMS as he is called, was soon to become the leader of all things associated with Open Source.

The ultimate goal of GNU was to free the world of ‘tyranny’ by creating a totally free Operating System. Stallman was considered to be an idealist. His software came with simple instructions: ‘Use this code. Modify it. Do whatever you want to do with it. But when you’re done, share it with your fellow users. Give something back to the community’! Sharing was a moral principle to RMS. He turned down money, fame and glory, everything that a common man could possibly desire, in the name of his moral principles. But then, great men have a mind, and a class, of their own.

Stallman wrote the GNU Manifesto, stating that availability of source code and freedom to develop, redistribute and modify software are ‘Fundamental Rights’. But Stallman had a larger problem: Even if users could share the software that he wrote, not many people were willing to publish the codes of their software. This bothered him. So, he decided to write an entire operating system, a complete set of development tools, and all the applications that anybody could ever require. More importantly, he planned to show to the world what his software was made of, so that the users could follow suit and develop it even further.

Around the same time, 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''. A dense network of UNIX hackers around the world helped to debug, maintain and improve the system. However, the software was not redistributed outside the community of holders of a UNIX AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) license. But in the late 1980s, it was finally distributed under the ``BSD license'', one of the first open source licenses. Unfortunately, at that time every user of BSD Unix also needed an AT&T UNIX license, since some parts of the kernel and several important utilities, which were essential for the system’s functionality, were still proprietary.

Other remarkable open source project of that time is TeX (a typesetting system, by Donald Knuth), which formed around it a strong community which still exists today.

More on History of Open Source

The Early Years

The computer world lived in peace in the 1960’s and 70’s. The programmers readily shared their ideas and source codes with fellow programmers. Global communication was not very prominent at that time, so the flow of information was restricted to universities and research labs. The seeds of Open Source were sowed here.
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The Revival

The Revolution

During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, open source software continued to develop. The Internet helped to coordinate and compile all the efforts and build up a bigger user base. Over time, much of the work was integrated creating complete environments based on UNIX. An interesting case here is of the ‘X Windows System’ which was the first Open Source software funded by a consortium of companies.
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The Current Scenerio

During the 1990s, many open source projects have produced a good quantity of useful and high-quality software which are in use the world over. Some of them are Apache (the most widely used server today), Perl (an interpreted programming 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 and non-tech savvy user with an easy to use and friendly desktop environment and interface), Mozilla (the free software project funded by Netscape to build a WWW browser), etc.
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The Last Word

In this fashion, the birth of ‘Open Source’ as we know it took place, and the early protagonists of the Open Source revival were born. Over time, they acquired good proportions in their respective fields, some going on to become market leaders. All such software boasted of high functionality and a large number of user-friendly features. By this time, Microsoft had got what they desired: monopolies in a large number of markets. At one time, their flagship product, Windows, was run on 95% of the PC’s worldwide.
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