Who "Invented" Open Source, Where and When?

An American political communication scientist, Lasswell, put forward the 5W communication mode. After the continuous application and development summary of later generations, a set of gradually mature "5W1H" systems has been formed, that is, for the selected project, process or operation, we should start from the reason (why), object (what), place (where), time (when), personnel (who) Methods (how) and other six aspects.

This series of articles introduces open-source with the 5W1H system. This time, let's talk about who / when / where of open-source - who "invented" open source when and where?

A letter from Microsoft

Since the advent of the first computer in the last century, the computer industry has been a hardware-based business model. Hardware sales are the primary source of income, and the accompanying software is free of charge and comes with source code, which is convenient for professionals to debug and modify. Although software copyrights are now considered commonplace, the law at that time did not give sufficient protection to this new thing. Later, with the popularity of PCs, the demand for software expanded, and several companies specializing in general software needed to charge for the software to make profits. But software fees are contradictory to providing the source code, as it cannot prevent the user or competitor from copying or rewriting the software code as long as it is still available.

Source: graph 1

On February 3, 1976, Bill Gates published the famous " open letter to hobbyists" . In this open letter, Bill Gates proposed that the software should have "CopyRight." This open letter laid the theoretical foundation of the software product "Copy Right" and promoted private software to become the mainstream of the development of the software industry. The concept of "Copy Right" will inevitably lead to the complete closure of the source code.

Objectively speaking, Bill Gates' concept of "Copy Right" and the rise of private software have contributed to the software industry's prosperity. However, the monopoly of private software manufacturers such as Microsoft on the software market has aroused strong dissatisfaction among users and software developers, and a movement against the concept of private software has sprung up. Open-source software is an essential part of this movement. The first rise of the private software movement is the Free Software Movement, the pioneer of the open-source software movement.

Free Software Movement

Some people feel uncomfortable or dissatisfied with the phenomenon that software has changed from free to fee and no longer provides source code. The most famous one is Richard Stallman, who launched the free software movement. In the 1970s, Richard worked as a programmer in the MIT AI lab. Xerox's printer no longer provides source code, and Richard can't solve the printer fault by modifying the code as before; Richard provided commercial companies with the public code of the LISP compiler, but the company refused to share the expanded and improved code. These two events prompted Richard to resign and devote himself to the free software movement.

In 1983, Richard began to advocate the Free Software Movement. In 1985, Stallman et al. Founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Stallman put forward the "CopyLeft" concept, which is opposed to the "Copy Right" concept. Its expression is GPL, that is, General Public License. Free software should have the following four freedoms:

• The freedom to run the software for any purpose;
• The freedom to study how the software works and improves to make it more to its needs;
• The freedom to republish to help neighbors;
• The freedom to improve procedures and publish improvement plans (and usually revisions) to promote the whole community's interests.

In 1991, the Free Software Foundation had developed most components of the GNU operating system (such as compilers, editors, user interface, etc.), but not yet completed the core of the operating system, namely GNU Hurd.

Source：open-source

Completing the operating system kernel was led by a 21-year-old Finnish college student, Linus Torvalds. For personal interest and testing purposes, Linus wrote the 0.01 Linux kernel in September 1991 that could not even run. But a month later, he wrote version 0.02, which already runs various GNU components (so Linux is often known as GNULinux). After version 0.02, programmers from around the world joined in developing the Linux kernel to refine it quickly. When version 0.12 was released in February 1992, Linus changed the license for the Linux kernel to the GPL license for version 2 and remains to this day. In March 1994, Linux kernel development version 1.00 was completed.

Source：Linux

The advent of Linux made the free software movement have its operating system. This operating system can compete with Microsoft's Windows. The free software movement had an early victory. However, the pursuit of freedom in the free software movement is, after all, incompatible with the actual business atmosphere, with an overly idealized color. This anti-commercial creed has made some people who are also opposed to proprietary software shy away from free software. In this background, some of the original free software movement activists began to connect the ideal free software with the actual business climate.

Open Source Software

In February 1998, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, and others established an Open Source Initiative (OSI) in California to promote open-source software. To reduce ideological gaps and the term "free (Free)." OSI decided to remove the word "free" from "free software" and use "open source software" as its common name. It created its definition of open source and its own set of licenses. According to the standards of the OSI, open-source software can use a Non-CopyLeft permissive license to permit the derivative code of the code under that license.

In a word, open-source software is open-source code and can be freely copied software. The idea of the open-source software movement is more focused on solving real problems, capturing the pain of proprietary software, and integrating it with business.