Open Source History : 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.

Now, Stallman is indeed a very intimidating creature. Some have gone to the extent of calling him a ‘fanatic’. Some of us have accepted Stallman; others have rejected him. On the other hand, just about everybody loves Linus, Guido and Larry. They're great guys, and they write some cool software. They're decent folks, too- not ‘fanatic’ preachers, but good, solid people who are a bit embarrassed by their fame.

But, what each of them has done for Open Source cannot be erased off anyone’s memory. They will go down in history as men who stood up against ‘tyranny’ and kicked dirt in its faces. They are the reason that the world is waking up to this revolution. They are the one’s that give hope for a better future, free from information monopolies with a very constructive environment, the sole purpose of which is the betterment of humanity. And just in case you had the thought, no, they are not dead. And Guido and Linus actually talk to each other.
Clearly, open source software is reaching the mainstream. The debate is stronger than ever, and the ubiquity of the Internet and publicity of key open source projects has changed the scope. Closed Sourced corporations and their business allies continue to disparage open source, creating a vivid conflict in marketing, the media, and mindshare.
Like a silent storm, open source runs much of the Internet and the Web (especially Web servers and gateways). It's making inroads on servers, desktops, mobile devices, everywhere. While Stallman, Torvalds, Raymond, and others are strongly influential in the future of open source, it has become a global phenomenon with an unclear future and uncertain implications on the industry’s future.

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

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.
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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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