Open Source Movement - Brief History

Brief History

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two different groups were establishing the roots of the current open source software movement. On the east coast, Richard Stallman, formerly of the MIT AI lab, created the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. The GNU project was aimed to create a free operating system, and used the GNU General Public License (GPL) as the software license to prohibit proprietization of the software, but allow redistribution and modification.

On the US West coast, the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California at Berkeley was adding improvements to the original Unix operating system from AT&T, and developed many applications which became known as "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 1991–1992, two significant events took place:

• In California, Bill Jolitz completed the Net/2 distribution, until it was ready to run on i386-class machines. Net/2 was the result of the effort of the CSRG to make an version of BSD Unix free of AT&T-copyrighted code. He 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 computer science student, unhappy with Tanenbaum's Minix, implemented the first versions of the Linux kernel. Soon, many people were collaborating to make that kernel more and more usable, and added many utilities to make GNU/Linux a real operating system.

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 used in many GNU/Linux distributions such as Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake, and many more.

The label “open source” was created and adopted by a group of people in the free software movement at a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator. One of the reasoning behind using the term was that "the of using the term open source that the business world usually tries to keep free technologies from being installed." Those people who adopted the term used the opportunity before the release of Navigator's source code to free themselves of the ideological and confrontational connotations of the term "free software". Later in February 1998, an organization called Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond “as an educational, advocacy, and stewardship organization at a cusp moment in the history of that culture.”