History of free and open-source software
For example, in the early years of automobile development, one enterprise owned the rights to a 2-cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B.
Such communal behavior later became a central element of the so-called hacking culture (a term with a positive connotation among free software programmers).
[6][7][failed verification][8] The first example of free and open-source software is believed to be the A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953,[9] which was released to customers with its source code.
[13] By the late 1960s change was coming: as operating systems and programming language compilers evolved, software production costs were dramatically increasing relative to hardware.
He invented copyleft, a legal mechanism to preserve the "free" status of a work subject to copyright, and implemented this in the GNU General Public License.
Since derivatives include combinations with other original programs, downstream authors are prevented from turning the initial work into proprietary software, and invited to contribute to the copyleft commons.
Even compilers could be distributed and for example Ratfor (and Ratfiv) helped researchers to move from Fortran coding to structured programming (suppressing the GO TO statement).
When users began gathering such source code, and setting up boards specifically to discuss its modification, this was a de facto open-source system.
[28] In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project to write a complete operating system free from constraints on use of its source code.
Among Linux distributions, Debian GNU/Linux, begun by Ian Murdock in 1993, is noteworthy for being explicitly committed to the GNU and FSF principles of free software.
[35] Therefore, the Free Software Foundation Latin America released in 2008 a modified version of the Linux-kernel called Linux-libre, where all proprietary and non-free components were removed.
They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of the sharing of source code.
The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested "open source",[8] Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Michael Tiemann, and Eric S. Raymond.
Originally titled the "Freeware Summit" and later named the "Open Source Summit",[44] the event brought together the leaders of many of the most important free and open-source projects, including Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape, and Eric Raymond.
On 13 October 2000, Sun Microsystems released[52] the StarOffice office suite as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Two key "heavyweight" desktop environments for free software operating systems emerged in the 1990s that were widely adopted: KDE and GNOME.
In September 2000, Trolltech made the Unix version of the Qt libraries available under the GPL, in addition to the QPL, which has eliminated the concerns of the Free Software Foundation.
[citation needed] In 2010, Canonical released the first version of Unity, a replacement for the prior default desktop environment for Ubuntu, GNOME.
In March 2017, Ubuntu announced that it will be abandoning Unity in favour of GNOME 3 in future versions, and ceasing its efforts in developing Unity-based smartphones and tablets.
[59] Several attempts have been made or are underway to replace X for these reasons, including: As free software became more popular, industry incumbents such as Microsoft started to see it as a serious threat.
This was despite SCO's CEO, Darl McBride, having made many wild and damaging claims of inappropriate appropriation to the media, many of which were later shown to be false, or legally irrelevant even if true.
The blog Groklaw was one of the most forensic examiners of SCO's claims and related events, and gained its popularity from covering this material for many years.
Many suspected that some or all of these legal and fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) attacks against the Linux kernel were covertly arranged by Microsoft, although this has never been proven.
Microsoft, after a failed attempt to appeal the decision through the Court of Justice of the European Union, eventually complied with the demand, producing volumes of detailed documentation.
This suggests that OOXML is not a true open standard, but rather a partial document describing what Microsoft Office does, and only involving certain file formats.
[citation needed] Because of this, in June 2007, Red Hat launched IcedTea to resolve the encumbered components with the equivalents from GNU Classpath implementation.
The unusual situation whereby Linux kernel development involved the use by some of proprietary software "came to a head" when Andrew Tridgell started to reverse-engineer BitKeeper with the aim of producing an open-source tool which could provide some of the same functionality as the commercial version.
Contributors can simply fork their own copy of a repository with one click, and issue a pull request from the appropriate branch when their changes are ready.
[75] Partly in response to uncertainty about the future of MySQL, the FOSS community forked the project into new database systems outside of Oracle's control.
[81] The Federal Circuit ruled that the small copyright infringement acknowledged by Google was not de minimis, and sent the fair use issue back to the trial judge for reconsideration.
