The term open source software is a mere 12 years old and barely qualifies as ‘history’. Two factors dictated that it feature in these pages: the fact that it is based on the much older concept of scientific discovery; and the tremendous effect it has already had on the software world as we know it. In short, it has been a game changer. GNU General Public Licence

Richard Stallman worried how the world would react to free software. Scientific knowledge is often in the public domain; it is one function of academic publishing to put it there. With software, however, it was clear that just letting the source code go into the public domain would tempt businesses to co-opt the code for their own profitability. Stallman’s answer to this threat was the GNU General Public Licence, known as the GPL. The GPL basically says that you may copy and distribute software licensed under the GPL at will, provided you do not inhibit others from doing the same, either by charging them for the software itself or by restricting them through further licensing. The GPL also requires works derived from work licensed under the GPL to be licensed under the GPL as well. When Stallman talks about free software, he is really talking about free speech. English handles the distinction here poorly, but it is the distinction between gratis and liberty, as in “Free as in speech, not as in beer”. This radical message (the freedom part, not the beer part) led many software companies to reject free software outright. After all, they are in the business of making money, not adding to our body of knowledge. For Stallman, this rift between the computer industry and computer science was acceptable, maybe even desirable. Source: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/intro.html The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete Unix-like operating system, which is free software. It eventually adopted the Linux kernel. Source: The Free Software Foundation

The roots of open source software go back to the hobbyist era of personal computing in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Brainstorm, December 2007/January 2008). This was a long time before the internet became broadly available. Enthusiasts shared the latest applications and utilities they had written by posting them on bulletin board services (BBS) – think of them as dial-up services for exchanging electronic files.