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 reques...