History of Free and Open Source Software
Back in 1960s’ and 1970s’,
there used to be special laboratory where tight-knit group of hackers spend
their time writing codes to develop the best possible program. This group had
their own ethics, hacker ethics and they had to honour their tradition. They
used their skills not only to write a new program but to improve an existing
program. Before late 1970’s, commercial manufacturers used to provide the
source code along with the software. But later the companies owning the
software began to close the source code (Williams, 2002; Li et al., 2005). In 1980 while
working in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Laboratory, Richard Stallman had encountered problem with the Xerox laser
printer. Being a software programmer, he wanted to fix the problem himself but
he couldn’t find the source code to work on. He decided to visit Carnegie
Mellon where the research for Xerox project was on progress. He met the
professor working on the project and requested him for the source code of laser
printer but was denied. The professor had signed in a non disclosure agreement
for the secrecy of the source code. Stallman had become a victim of the
nondisclosure agreement. He also encountered some more negative experience from
the commercial software. In early
1980’s to get a modern computer, one had got a proprietary operating system and
the developers didn’t want to share its source code. The developers controlled
the users and restricted them. Richard Stallman had moral issues regarding
this. Because of all the negative experience he had encountered, he decided to build up a new
system and encourage everyone to share it (Williams, 2002; Revolution
OS, 2002; Gallego et al., 2008).
In 1983, Stallman posted a
message in the Usenet newsgroup about developing a new system which was called
GNU and was like the UNIX operating system. The name GNU itself is a hack which
is recursive and stands for "GNU's Not Unix". He requested for
contribution of time, money, programs and equipments. Some people joined in the
project, but for most of the community, they wanted to know that it could be
done. He resigned from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's and began
starting working on the GNU version of Emacs. When he published it, people
downloaded it and thought the GNU system was possible and began contributing to
GNU project. He went on to found Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the
business side of the project (Williams,
2002).
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