The free/open source software movement began in the "hacker" culture of U.S. computer science laboratories (Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT) in the 1960's and 1970's.
The community of programmers was small, and close-knit. Code passed back and forth between the members of the community--if you made an improvement you were expected to submit your code to the community of developers.To withhold code was considered gauché--after all, you benefited from the work of your friends, you should return the favor.
It was in this environment that Richard Stallman began his computer science career in 1971, as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence lab. Stallman worked primarily on ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, an operating system homebrewed at MIT to run on the DEC PDP-10 hardware architecture. In this collegial environment, Stallman and his colleagues built an enormous array of software tools for the PDP-10. However, by the early 80's, the hacker community began to break down at MIT and other universities and DEC discontinued the PDP-10. As a result, the ITS software became obsolete, because it was written specifically for the PDP-10 hardware architecture. The PDP-10's replacements, such as the VAX or the 68020, had their own operating systems, but none of them were free software: you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement even to get an executable copy. (DiBona, et al. 1999)
Moreover, many of the hackers were hired away by commercial companies who sold proprietary systems. One of the first to break ranks was a student named Brian Reed at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1980, Reed wrote Scribe, one of the first text-formatting programs to incorporate semantic markup. However, Reed
"....then surprised everyone by selling it to a company, instead of sharing it with the community. The company was very proprietary about it, and very obnoxiously put time bombs into it. Somebody I know spent hours debugging why our copy had ceased to work.A another major blow also came in 1980, when two companies were formed to sell MIT's Lisp Machine technology. Richard Greenblatt, a senior Lisp machine project hacker at the AI lab, formed a company called Lisp Machine, Inc. (LMI). Another group of hackers, including David Moon, Howie Shrobe, and Howard Cannon got backing to found Symbolics. Between the two companies, they hired away most of the AI lab's staff. The prospect that all future improvements to the MIT Lisp system and MACSYMA (an artificial intelligence based math engine based on Lisp) would be proprietary angered Stallman. So for a year, he attempted to match feature by feature the improvements in the proprietary Lisp systems in the MIT Lisp system. Eventually he gave up, because as talented and dedicated a hacker as Stallman was, he could not keep up with the combined efforts of a team of equally talented hackers. (Lemon, 1997 and Siska, 1997)
Eventually he came across the time bomb which had been put in there purely for profit-insuring purposes. He was extremely angry that he had wasted all that time on a bug that had been deliberately created. From the view point of people in the software sharing community, anything artificially put in to stop people from running a program is simply a deliberate bug.
The problem was that nobody censured or punished this student for what he did. He got away with it. The result was other people got tempted to follow his example. Many years later he stated that he believed his own program was much less used as a result of his decision, that it would have become far more popular and influential if he had shared is as was normal." (Bennahum,1996 and King, 1999)
"I was faced with a choice. One: join the proprietary software world,
sign the nondisclosure agreements and promise not to help my fellow
hackers. Two: leave the computer field altogether. Or three, look for
a way that a programmer could do something for the good. I asked
myself, was there a program or programs I could write, so as to make a
community possible again?" (King, 1999)
In January 1984, Stallman resigned from MIT so that the university would have no claims on the software he created. (With the blessing of Dr. Winston, then the head of the AI lab, he continued to use his office and MIT hardware.) (Stallman, 1999)
Stallman devoted his first efforts an operating system. Without an operating system, a computer is just a hunk of worthless metal, glass, and plastic. The most commonly used and powerful operating system at the time was the Unix system, first developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. Since a lot of software already existed for Unix, Stallman decided to make his operating system Unix compatible, to make the transition from proprietary software to his libré software as easy as possible. He called his project GNU (Gnu's Not Unix), to distinguish his software from the proprietary versions.
In 1985, Stallman created the Free Software Foundation, a tax exempt charity, to support his work and that of his collaborators. Stallman personally created an enormous body of software: GCC (C compiler), GDB (debugger), Emacs (text editor), and a number of other tools.
To be sure, Stallman's efforts were neither the first nor the only libré software development efforts. The X consortium, for example, developed the X windowing system. Perl, the most commonly used scripting language for web sites, was developed by Larry Wall while working on a government sponsored project at Burroughs. Another free version of Unix was developed by a group based at the University of California at Berkeley. However, the Free Software Foundation's efforts were probably the most extensive, and the most visible.
To ensure that his code would always be freely modifiable and distributable, he created the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL specified that users of the source code could view, change, or add to the code, provided that they made their changes available under the same license as the original code. He founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to promote the development of GNU and other GPL'd software. For the creation of the GNU system, the GPL license, and the Free Software Foundation, Stallman was awarded the MacArthur fellowship in 1990.
Now the only thing that the GNU system lacked was a kernel, the heart of an operating system. In 1990, Stallman's team began work on HURD, an OS based on the MACH microkernel architecture, which was first developed at Carnegie Mellon. (According to Thomas Bushnell, principal architect of HURD, HURD is the first piece of software to be named by mutually recursive acronyms: Hurd = Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons. Hird = Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth). However, work on the HURD progressed very slowly, and the kernel was very incomplete as of 1991.
Enter a 21 year old, second year graduate student at the University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds (Ghosh, 1998). Torvalds wrote a Unix-like kernel based on Minix, a small Unix clone used as a teaching tool. Torvalds submitted his kernel, called Linux (Linus + Unix) for review to various newsgroups and mailing lists. Several other programmers began to modify and tweak the code, sending their improvements back to Torvalds for inclusion in the next release of the kernel. Eventually, Linux became the de facto kernel for the GNU operating system.
In 1997, Eric Raymond published an essay entitled The Cathedral and The Bazaar. In the essay, Raymond articulated the reasons why he believed that open source licenses--licenses that allowed anyone to freely view, modify, and distribute the code--resulted in higher quality, less expensive software. The essay spread quickly through the programming community.
At the same time, Netscape was involved in a fierce struggle with Microsoft to see whose browser would become the dominant browser on the desktop: Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. Microsoft's decision to give away Internet Explorer, combined with their control of the Windows operating system, led to the increasing erosion of Netscape's market share. Netscape feared that Microsoft dominance would shift web protocols from open to proprietary standards that only Microsoft's servers would be able to service. Influenced by Raymond's essay, several managers at Netscape believed that the best way to keep web protocols open would be to release the code to the Netscape browser.
On January 22nd, 1998, Netscape announced that it would open the sourc code for Netscape Navigator 5.0. Their announcement gave the free/open source software community a great boost in credibility in the eyes of business community.
Shortly afterward, a coalition of individuals, led by Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and Tim O'Reilly, decided that the the free software community needed better marketing. They formed the Open Source Initiative to a) promote the pragmatic benefits to the business community, and b) certify free/open source licenses that meet the Open Source Definition.
The Open Source Iniative's evangelism paid off. Following Netscape's announcement, several additional vendors announced support for Linux, including Oracle, IBM, and Corel. Intel and Netscape invested in Red Hat, the largest English language Linux distributor. (Raymond, 1999)
A statistically insignificant presence in 1997, the popularity of Linux and the free/open source software movement has exploded. Linux and open souce now run more than 60% of the websites on the Internet. Additionally, The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that Linux has 25% of the back office server market, second only to Windows at 38%. In the coveted desktop market, with a 6% share, Linux is now the second most popular desktop, unseating Apple in late 2003. Moreover, Linux sales are up on revenue at 35% and unit shipments of 31.1%. That means that over the space of three years the size of the Linux market is going to double, compared to 10-12% growth rates for other operating systems. These assume the current rates remain the same, but in the case of Linux we're now looking at the 11th successive quarter of double-digit growth so it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
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