Free For All

I was born in 1983.
Little did I know that I was born in a such a significant period in the software history.

In a different world to where I was born, programmers in universities shared the software they wrote. Sharing the software meant sharing the code. But things took a turn when it was found how to lock up the source code to a program by only distributing a machine-readable version.

In the early 1980s, an operating system known as UNIX had grown to be very popular in universities and laboratories. AT&T designed and built it at Bell Labs throughout the 1970s. In the beginning, the company shared the source code with researchers and computer scientists in universities, in part because the company was a monopoly that was only allowed to sell telephone service. UNIX was just an experiment that the company started to help run the next generation of telephone switches, which were already turning into specialized computers.

When the phone company started splitting up in 1984, the folks at AT&T wondered how they could turn a profit from what was a substantial investment in time and money. They started by asking people who used UNIX at the universities to sign non-disclosure agreements.

University of California at Berkeley had developed a version of UNIX known as BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and they wanted to keep it free and share the source code. They had contributed lot to unix and it was difficult to decide who had copyright to what.

AT&T and University of Bekerly went for a historical legal battle over the usage of UNIX

When I was one, Richard Stallmean left the Artificial Intelligence Lab of MIT where he worked and he founded the Free Software Foundation. He didn't like the idea of locking up source code at all. He wrote the GNU ("GNU's Not UNIX") Manifesto and created very advanced tools like the GNU Emacs text editor to be distributed with the source.

While I was going to primary school in this part of the world, a poor student was writting a little toy program in Finland. His name was Linus Torvalds and he named the OS he created as Linux. He created a working system with a compiler in less than half a year.

Professor Andy Tanenbaum, a fairly well-respected and famous computer scientist, got in a long debate with Torvalds over the structure of Linux. He looked down at Linux and claimed that Linux would have been worth two F's in his class because of its design. :)

In 1998, a group of people in the free software community created a new term, "open source." To make sure everyone knew they were serious, they started an unincorporated organization, registered a trademark, and set up a website (www.opensource.org).

After 3 decades, in my part of the world I'm typing this blogpost in my office laptop with linux in it. Open source surely has come a long way!