Most of the text is taken from: Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_history
Created by annette on Oct 16, 2009
Last updated: 03/12/10 at 01:02 AM
In August 1999, Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice office suite as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The free software version was renamed OpenOffice.org, and coexists with StarOffice.
http://www.openoffice.org/
Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring free software principles and benefits to the commercial software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of the sharing of source code. The new name they chose was "open source," and quickly Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others signed on to the rebranding. The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage use of the new term and evangelize open source principles.
http://www.opensource.org/
Follow the link below to read Richard Stallman's reaction to the founding of the Open Source Initiative " Open Source misses the point". This split between the concepts of free software and the new term - open source - illustrates the philosophical differences between the two organizations.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
In 1997, Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a reflective analysis of the hacker community and free software principles. The paper received significant attention in early 1998 and was one factor in motivating Netscape Communications Corporation to release their popular Netscape Communicator Internet suite as free software. This code is today better known as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
In the mid to late 90s, when many website-based companies were starting up, free software became a popular choice for web servers. Apache HTTP Server became the most used web server software - a title that still holds as of 2008.
http://www.apache.org/
The Linux kernel, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. The licence wasn't exactly a free software licence, but with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License. Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted the attention of volunteer programmers. Until this point, the GNU project's lack of a kernel meant that no complete free software operating systems existed. The development of Torvalds' kernel closed that last gap. The combination of the almost-finished GNU operating system and the Linux kernel made the first complete free software operating system.
In 1989, the first version of the GNU General Public License was published.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html
Richard Stallman founds the Free Software Foundation to promote the concept and a free software definition is published in February 1986.
http://www.fsf.org/
In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project to write a complete operating system free from constraints on use of its source code.
http://www.gnu.org/
The advent of Usenet in the early 1980s further connected the programming community and provided a simpler way for programmers to share their software and contribute to software others had written.
http://www.usenet.com/
In 1979, AT&T began to enforce its restrictive licences when the company decided it might profit by selling the Unix system.
In 1976 Bill Gates signaled the change of the times when he wrote his now-famous Open Letter to Hobbyists, sending out the message that what hackers called "sharing" was, in his words, "stealing".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
In the 1970s AT&T distributed early versions of UNIX at no cost to government and academic researchers, but these versions did not come with permission to redistribute or to distribute modified versions, and were thus not free software in the modern meaning of the phrase.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UNIX-Licence-Plate.JPG
In the late 1960's the cost of developing software was growing due to its increasing complexity. While some software continued to come at no cost, there was a growing amount of software that was for sale only.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitosha_Computer.JPG
In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced largely by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration and was not itself seen as a commodity. Operating systems were widely distributed and maintained by the community of users. Source code, the human-readable version of software, was distributed with software because users frequently modified the software themselves to fix bugs or add new functionality. An IBM mainframe operating system, Airline Control Program (ACP), from 1967 reportedly distributed its source code in a way very similar to free software.
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