Free Software History

In the beginning was Unix

In 1969-1970, Kenneth Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others at AT&T Bell Labs began developing a small operating system on a little-used PDP-7. The operating system was soon christened Unix, a pun on an earlier bigger operating system project called MULTICS. In 1972-1973 the system was rewritten in the programming language C, an unusual step that was visionary. Due to this decision, Unix was the first widely-used operating system that could switch from and outlive its original hardware. Other innovations were added to Unix as well, partly due to synergies between Bell Labs and the academic community. In 1979, the ``seventh edition'' (V7) version of Unix was released, the grandfather of all extant Unix systems.

After this point, the history of Unix becomes somewhat convoluted. The academic community, led by Berkeley, developed a variant called the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), while AT&T continued developing Unix under the names ``System III'' and later ``System V''. In the late 1980's through early 1990's the ``wars'' between the multiple commercial variants of Unix.

The BSD Long Walk to open source

By 1989, the group in charge of BSD development had re-written so much of the original Unix code that they decided to release the non-AT&T portions of the code to the public, as the Net/2 distribution. BSD development was stifled by a damaging lawsuit filed by the owners of Unix, Unix Systems Labs, who claimed that BSD contained copyrighted Unix code.

This lawsuit only finished in 1994 and resulted in a release called 4.4BSD-Lite whose licence terms allow free redistribution in source and binary form, subject only to the condition that the University copyrights remain intact and the University receives credit when others use the code. All the BSD groups which were doing releases at that time, BSDI, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, had to restart their code base with the 4.4BSD-Lite.

Three versions of the BSD branch of Unix ended up as open source: FreeBSD (concentating on ease-of-installation for PC-type hardware), NetBSD (concentrating on many different CPU architectures), and a variant of NetBSD, OpenBSD (concentrating on security).

1984 : The FSF and the GNU Project

The concept of free software is an old one. When computers first reached universities, they were research tools. Software source code was freely passed around, and programmers were paid for the act of programming, not for the programs themselves. Only later on, when computers reached the business world, did programmers and business people begin to support themselves by restricting the rights to their software and charging fees for each copy.

Free Software as a political idea has been popularized by Richard Stallman since 1984, when he formed the Free Software Foundation[1] and its GNU Project[2]. Stallman's premise is that people should have more freedom, and should appreciate their freedom. He designed a set of rights that he felt all users should have, and codified them in the GNU General Public License or GPL. Stallman punningly christened his license the "copyleft" because it leaves the right to copy in place.

Stallman himself developed seminal works of free software such as the GNU C Compiler, the GNU YACC-compatible Parser Generator Bison and GNU Emacs, a text editor so alluring to some that it is spoken like a religion. His work inspired many others to contribute free software under the GPL. Although it is not promoted with the same libertarian fervor, the Open Source Definition includes many of Stallman's ideas, and can be considered a derivative of his work.

1991 Linux birth

In August, Linus Torvalds announced his plans to create a free operating system on the Minix users newsgroup. He modestly notes in his posting that his OS is "just a hobby. It won't be big and professional like GNU." In October, Linux 0.01 is released on the Internet under a GNU public license. In the Minix newsgroup, Torvalds asked fellow programmers to lend a hand in making the system more workable. He got enough help to release version 0.10 by December. Over the next few years, Linux developers grew into hundreds of thousands and worked to make Linux compatible with GNU programs.

His kernel could be combined with the FSF material and other components (in particular some of the BSD components and MIT's X Window software) to produce a freely-modifiable and very useful operating system : the ``Linux'' or ``GNU/Linux'' operating system.

In the Linux community, different organizations have combined the available components differently. Each combination is called a ``distribution'', and the organizations that develop distributions are called ``distributors'' or ``distribution vendors''. Common distributions include Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera and Debian. There are differences between the various distributions, but they are based on the same foundation: the Linux kernel and the GNU glibc libraries. Since both are covered by ``copyleft'' style licenses, changes to these foundations generally must be made available to all, a unifying force between the Linux distributions at their foundation that does not exist between the BSD and AT&T-derived Unix systems.

Linux 2.0 release was available in June 1996. At that time, it already could be considered as a mature operating system. Later releases, 2.2 in January 1999 and 2.4 in January 2001, are even more mature and powerful, scaling up to 4- and 8- processors servers and supporting many hardware platforms (Intel, Alpha, PPC, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, 680xx, S/390...).

1998 : The Open Source Initiative (OSI)

To present the history of the Open Source Initiative, we can cite one part of a brief history of the open-source concept from the www.opensource.org website:

The prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture.[3]

The "open source" label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John "maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond.

We were reacting to Netscape's announcement that it planned to give away the source of its browser. One of us (Raymond) had been invited out by Netscape to help them plan the release and follow on actions. We realized that the Netscape announcement had created a precious window of time within which we might finally be able to get the corporate world to listen to what we have to teach about the superiority of an open development process.

We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed on tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

"OSI Certified Open Source Software."

Since the community needs a reliable way of knowing whether a piece of software really is open-source, OSI is registering a certification mark for this purpose, OSI Certified. In the next section we present the licenses approved by OSI.