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The History of Open Source Software

The history of open source software is among the longest in terms of time period the history of software. In fact, in the beginning there was only free open source software. Later proprietary software was born and dominated software industry until recently. According to Jesús M. González-Barahona’s document, in the 1960’s IBM’s first large-scale commercial computers were open source, in a sense that it could be freely shared and modified among its users (Jesus, 2000). However in mid- 1970’s IBM’s policy was changed and users were not allowed to see or redistribute the source code (Jesus, 2000). Same trend continued during 1970’s and 80s when software developers closed off their software source code from users. At early 1985 Richard Stallman, a formal programmer at MIT lap resigned and launched the GNU project and Free Software Foundation which promoted the production of more free and open source software (Wheeler, 2007). During Early 1990s oen source software were developing in several isolated groups because of the limitation in communication. The growth of open source slowly accelerated during 1990’s because of USENET and the internet that helped coordinate transitional efforts and build up user communities (Jesus, 2000). The late 1990’s open source system based on GNU and Linux gained public acceptance and became alternative to proprietary systems. During 2002 Mozilla Firefox browser and OpenOffice.org office suite were announced. During late 2003 open source operating system, Android Inc., was found which right now is owned by Google and the leading software in portable devices (Markoff, 2007).