History of "OPENSOURSE"?

History

I'd like to tell you a story about what everyone calls "open source" software. There's a lot of heros, a wild-eyed visionary but no villians. At least not yet. It's a pretty long story, and I'm only telling you a few of the parts I know. This story started almost twenty years ago, and it isn't over yet.

Richard Stallman In the early 80's, a programmer named Richard Stallman worked for MIT. He spent huge amounts of time working on the original Emacs an operating system called ITS, and the exceedingly cool LISP machines. Stallman wrote good software. His programs were clever--they were frequently built around a few good ideas that made everything else easy. But Stallman was also an ideologue. His software came with instructions: Share this code with your fellow users. Learn from it. Improve upon it.

The GNU Project and The Free Software Foundation Stallman found some volunteers, set up the Free Software Foundation, and started writing software. He wrote a new version of Emacs, which still gets rave reviews from authors like Neal Stephenson. He wrote GCC, which was one of the best C compilers of the age. The GNU project also adopted some their software from outside sources. They borrowed the X Window System from MIT and Compaq. They adopted TeX (a typesetting system) from Donald Kunth. They stayed away, however, from the BSD code, which was the target of an AT&T lawsuit at the time.

Linus Torvalds By 1991, the GNU Project had either written or located most of the parts of a complete Unix system. But they were having problems with the kernel. Meanwhile, young Linus Torvalds was hacking on a tiny kernel, just a toy. He annouced it on comp.os.minix: I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. To compile Linux, you needed GCC. To run any programs, you needed the GNU C library. And half of the programs available for Linux were originally written by GNU volunteers.

The Linux Explosion But despite Linus's debt to the GNU project, he made a much better leader than Stallman. Linus was a software guy, pure and simple. Linus could convince people, many of whom were frightened by Stallman. And Linux grew from "just a hobby" to the third most popular operating system in the world.