Milestones in Free and Open Source Software History, 1969-2015
![Milestones in Free and Open Source Software History, 1969-2015 Milestones in Free and Open Source Software History, 1969-2015](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltc6d228adc7cb08a2/652467fd11c6ce7a49f472fd/Linux_Origins_0.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Unix, the operating system created at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1969, was never a free or open source OS. But its code was freely shared within the community of Unix hackers that evolved before AT&T commercialized the system in the early 1980s, and Unix became the OS that free and open source programmers sought to clone through open code. For these reasons, Unix was crucial in laying the foundations for what became open source.
In the fall of 1983 Richard Stallman, a veteran of MIT's AI Lab who was unhappy with the increasingly closed nature of software source code, announced the GNU project. His goal was to build a clone of Unix using only code that could be freely shared and would always be publicly available. Many parts of the GNU operating system, which Stallman began building in early 1984, remain central to the free and open source software ecosystem today.
While the GNU project provided the beginnings of a freely shared code base, it was not until 1985, when Stallman created the Free Software Foundation, that the political dimensions of free code began to find their footing. By helping to organize and fund free software development, the FSF over the past thirty years has provided crucial grounding for GNU and many other projects. It has also helped connect free code to social and political causes that share similar goals.
In June 1991 developers at the University of California, Berkeley released Net/2 BSD, a freely redistributable Unix-like operating system. The BSD development effort dated to the 1970s, when it began as an effort to add functionality to AT&T Unix. After the latter became a commercial product in the early 1980s, however, the BSD team started working to free BSD of AT&T code entirely. Net/2 was the first version of BSD that essentially reached that goal. In the summer of 1991, a time before anyone had heard of Linux and the GNU developers were struggling to create a kernel, BSD seemed very promising as a free Unix-like OS. In the event, however, beset by legal troubles (and, arguably, licensing terms that were too liberal), BSD and its derivatives never gained as wide a following as GNU/Linux.
In August 1991 Linus Torvalds, a humble undergraduate based in Finland, announced on Usenet that he had built a free kernel for a Unix-like operating system. Although Torvalds at the time never expected his kernel, which came to be known as Linux, to gain a significant following, it ended up as probably the most famous free and open source software program. Combined with the tools produced by the GNU project (whose own efforts to create a kernel, called Hurd, never really took off), the Linux kernel became wildly successful.
By the early 1990s the Web was becoming a big deal, yet the software for serving websites remained closed. That changed in 1995, when a group of admins began collaborating to build the Apache HTTP Server. Based on another server platform developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which had been abandoned by its original developers, the Apache server quickly rose to prominence, claiming a majority of Web server market share by 1996. In the following years the purview of Apache developers, who endorsed more liberal licensing terms than those that governed GNU and Linux, expanded their purview by overseeing a number of other open source projects through the Apache Software Foundation, which launched in 1999.
One characteristic that set Linux and other open source projects born in the 1990s apart from GNU was that they were collaboratively developed by large, relatively decentralized groups of programmers. (The GNU development strategy initially centered on small teams of programmers working in relative isolation.) Those coders originally collaborated via email, then moved onto source code management (SCM) systems. In the case of Linux, developers relied on a proprietary SCM system called BitKeeper until 2005, when the owners of the platform stopped allowing free use of the product. In response, Torvalds wrote Git as an open source replacement.
Starting in 2008, when Git repositories became available through Web services like GitHub, Git helped drive a revolution in the way open source code was managed by making the development process more scalable than ever, and allowing nearly everyone to contribute. In other words, Git brought the openness of open source coding to a new level, making it possible for anyone to launch an open source project quickly and accept contributions seamlessly through the Web.
Relations between Microsoft and the free and open source software community were tense when GNU, Linux, the Apache server and other free and open source products began cutting into Redmond's market share in the late 1990s. Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's CEO, went so far in 2001 as to call Linux a "cancer." But by 2015 times had changed. The company's new CEO now declares that "Microsoft loves Linux," and has overseen a number of changes that have eased the integration of Microsoft and open source products over the past couple of years — even if some open source fans continue to doubt the company's intentions.
Relations between Microsoft and the free and open source software community were tense when GNU, Linux, the Apache server and other free and open source products began cutting into Redmond's market share in the late 1990s. Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's CEO, went so far in 2001 as to call Linux a "cancer." But by 2015 times had changed. The company's new CEO now declares that "Microsoft loves Linux," and has overseen a number of changes that have eased the integration of Microsoft and open source products over the past couple of years — even if some open source fans continue to doubt the company's intentions.
As the twenty-fifth birthday of the Linux kernel approaches, it's high time to take a look back at this and other major developments in the history of open source software. Here's The VAR Guy's overview of milestones in open source history, from the introduction of Unix to today's Microsoft-Linux lovefest.
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