User:Joannelyn it3a

De la Vega, Joannelyn C. BSIT 3A

History of Open Source

The history given here is not intended to be a complete, and perfect rendering of the history of the open source movement. Indeed it would be quite impossible to do so, as we are currently in the middle of the movement, and proper histories cannot be written about current events. Instead this chapter is intended to give the reader a general understanding of how the open source movement got started, so they can better understand the current debates. In the beginning (1960's and 1970's) nearly all code was provided as a form of open-source. Since you had to get programs to run on many different machines, companies that wanted customers to be able to run their software they had to provide the source code to compile themselves. Frequently this code was not encumbered by licensing agreements, or those licenses were never enforced. Often the users would notice flaws in the programs, fix them, and provide the improvements back to the publisher at no charge. Unix user groups often shared code with each other as well, creating an even larger body of code to work from. At the time most companies believed that hardware would always generate far more profit than software. At the same time when academics wrote programs as part of their research, they would often release the code into the public domain to others to learn from their work. The first email server, ftp server, and web server were all public domain projects that were created by academics and shared as public domain software. Over time the hardware became more standardized. This allowed software publishers to tighten up on what segments of code they would allow their users to see and edit. This tightening started to frustrate users, especially academics, since they could no longer fix the problem they found, and from time to time found that they couldn't use the hardware or software they wanted to. This trend mostly continued in main stream software, strengthed by the rise of Microsoft. During the late 1970's, many small businesses attempted to survive writing software for the new microcomputers. None were able to rely on hardware sales or after sale support contracts to subsidize software development. Few of these people, whether from an academic tradition of freely distributed software or not, were willing to make their products available without fee. Perhaps most famously, Bill Gates (a co-founder of Microsoft) realized that software, not hardware, held the prospect of being the greatest profit source in the new world of computing. When IBM needed an operating system for their personal computer, instead of writing their own, Microsoft licensed an early version of DOS, but retained the licensing rights for other hardware manufacturers. This choice changed the face of computing by creating a standard operating system that most personal computers would run on, it lead directly to Microsoft's dominance of personal computing, and later allowed them major access to the server side market as well. Microsoft has grown into the largest software producer in the world, competing in almost every segment of the market. There are many people that feel that the only way to compete with Microsoft is through open source projects which leverage a far larger support base than most companies can provide. In this sea of activity, the FOSS movement primarily grew out of two places: the Berkeley Software Distribution license from the University of California and Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation Gnu Public License.

BSD During the 1970s, after Ken Thompson of Bell Labs spent a year teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, several research groups there began to develop software for the Unix operating system. And, as Bell Labs had no plans to port the system to the then new DEC VAX computer system, the Computer Science Research Group at Berkeley undertook the port. That port became very popular at other universities, and the CSRG began distribution of it, with their modifications and additions, under the name Berkeley Software Distribution. The researchers at Berkeley frequently found ways to improve or add to the existing versions of Unix. Bell Labs accepted some of the BSD changes, and passed on others. Over time the CSRG found ways to improve the basic aspects of Unix (eg, the file system). Concurrently, AT&T made improvements of their own, causing the two versions to move in different (although similar) directions. As development progressed on the Berkeley version of Unix, it grew further and further away from the work that AT&T was doing on their version (the last version of which was System V). In the early 1990s there was a major legal skirmish over the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) between AT&T, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Unix System Laboratories (USL), to which AT&T had turned over the marketing and development of Unix. The suit resulted in most of BSD being found to be unencumbered by copyright restrictions by those who controlled the original Bell Labs code. By the mid-1990s, the CSRG released 4.4BSD-Lite, Release 2 as their final product as they were closed down by the Regents of the University of California. The BSD releases were the root of the various versions of BSD that are common today, most notably FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Throughout its development, BSD was distributed in an open manner, resulting in contributions from many different contributors.  The Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project In 1983 Richard Stallman (then of MIT) became frustrated with the growing commercialization of the computer development work that had been done at MIT, and with the increasing limitations imposed on software users. After a time, he began to create software that gave control to users. His vision was to create an entire operating system totally free of the restrictions being imposed by proprietary licensing. His first major software development effort (even before he became disenchanted with trends in the software industry) was the text editor, GNU Emacs. His next was a LISP system, a w:C compiler, and finally the GNU project.

In 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to help generate support for the GNU Project. FSF has grown into one of the most important organizations in the FOSS movement. While the primary FSF mission continues to be the completion of the GNU operating system, FSF has also taken on the role of "free-software evangelist" by protecting and supporting free software. FSF also holds the copyrights to much of the source code written for the GNU project, ensuring that it always remains freely availabe to users. Over the next 10 years Stallman gathered a group of people together who essentially developed all of the core utitilies found in Unix and the Unix-like operating systems. In the Unix spirit, these consist of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of small utility programs and tools. This project is still operating and is known as the GNU Project. Many of these programs have become standard on the BSD variants as well (see above). In 1994, Linus Torvalds released the first version of the Linux kernel, and when combined with the GNU utilities already available from the GNU Project, the Linux operating system came to be. The Debian distribution of Linux is called GNU/Linux, in recognition of Stallman's position that it is a joint production, to recognize that the GNU Project provides most of the essential utilities. The GNU Project continues its slow progress on its own operating system kernel, which will be known as Hurd. Hurd is intended to be offered as the official GNU replacement for the Unix kernel, though it is currently at a beta development stage. While the FSF has become somewhat controversial, it has certainly had a major impact on computing. Millions of copies of the GNU software are used every day throughout the world.

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