Open Source Software In the beginning all software was free in the 1960s when IBM and others sold the first large scale computers these machines came with software which was free This software could be freely shared among users The software came written in a programming language and it could be improved and modified Then proprietary software dominated the software landscape IBM and others realized that most users couldn t or didn t want to fix their own software and There was money to be made in leasing software Adapted from http eu conecta it paper brief history open source html Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software In mid 1970s it software was proprietary users were not allowed to redistribute it that source code was not available users could not modify the programs Adapted from http eu conecta it paper brief history open source html Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software In late 1970s and early 1980s two different groups started what became known as the open source software movement East coast Richard Stallman formerly a programmer at the MIT AI Lab launched the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation ultimate goal of the GNU Project was to build a free operating system the GNU General Public License GPL was designed to ensure that the software produced by GNU will remain free and to promote the production of more and more free software Adapted from http eu conecta it paper brief history open source html Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software West coast the Computer Science Research Group CSRG of the University of California at Berkeley was improving the Unix system and building applications which quickly become BSD Unix efforts were funded mainly by DARPA contracts a network of Unix programmers around the world helped to debug maintain and improve the system in late 1980s distributed under the BSD license one of the first open source licenses Unfortunately still contained some components that were proprietary requiring a license from AT T Adapted from http eu conecta it paper brief history open source html Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software During the 1980s and early 1990s open source software continued its development initially in several relatively isolated groups Slowly much of the software was integrated The various groups merged As a result of this i complete operating environments could be built on top of Unix using open source software Many Internet ISPs use UNIX as their operating system of choice Adapted from http eu conecta it paper brief history open source html Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software 1991 1992 the open source world improved In California Bill Jolitz implementing a version of BSD Unix free of AT T s copyright The work was covered by the BSD license making it completely free It included other free software GNU licenses Adapted from http eu conecta it paper brief history open source html Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software Also during 1991 1992 In Finland Linus Torvalds a Finnish computer science student was implementing the first versions of Linux Other people joined to collaboration to create the GNU Linux operating system By 1993 both GNU Linux and BSD Unix were free stable operating environments Both continue to evolve Adapted from http eu conecta it paper brief history open source html Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process The promise of open source is better quality higher reliability more flexibility lower cost and an end to predatory vendor lock in The Open Source Initiative OSI is a non profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source OSI includes a standards body maintaining the Open Source Definition for the good of the community http www opensource org Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software Today there are many who believe proprietary software is the only possible model Microsoft Recently the software industry has begun to considered free software as an option again Apple s OS X and Leopard are based on Unix Google s Chrome Mozilla Firefox Copyright 2008 by Helene G Kershner Open Source Software Revolution OS Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU Linux and the open source and free software movements http video google ca videoplay docid 7707585592627775409
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