History open source

A History of "Open Source"

 

    

Author    :	Eric Kidd
Posted    :	8/19/2000; 3:09:36 PM
Topic     :	A History of "Open Source"
Msg #     :	19844
Prev/Next :	19843 / 19845

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 (who might be a madman), 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

• Early 80's, a 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. And when you're done, please give something back to the community.

To Stallman, this sharing was a moral principle. And as it turned out, Stallman would happily turn down money, fame and glory in the name of his moral principles.

""You can read the whole story in Levy's excellent (but out-of-print) book, Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution"".

Linus Torvalds

 

•   By 1991, the GNU Project had either written or located most of the parts of a complete Unix system. 

       Stallman (and other volunteers) were working on a kernel called the HURD. Unfortunately, the HURD was a bit too clever, and the team had gotten in over their heads. They certainly weren't in any danger of shipping.

Meanwhile, young Linus Torvalds was hacking on a tiny kernel, just a toy. He announced 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.

·        Linus never made any secret of his debt to the GNU project. He even decided to use their (rather complicated) software license as a way of saying

 thank you.............

References :-    http://static.userland.com/userLandDiscussArchive/msg019844.html