History of Open Source
Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development. Open Source refers to computer software whose source code is available under a copyright license that permits users to study, change and improve upon a particular package. This improved version can then be redistributed freely amongst developers, resulting in a more efficient piece of software.
In its simplest form, open source software has existed since the 1960s when IBM (and others) sold large-scale commerical computers. These machines came bundled with 'free' software that could be shared amongst users. The source code for such software was also included which could be modified and improved upon before redistributing. This all changed during the late 1960s and by the early 1970s it was usual to find new machines bundled with proprietary software, which did not include source code and hence could not be modified or redistributed.
During the 1980s and early 1990s open source software continued its development, fuelled primiarily by the Internet which not only helped to coordinate transnational efforts but also strengthened user communities. Before long, much of the software already developed was integrated and the work of many groups of developers was merged. This consequently brought about the development of complete environments, such as the X Windows System which was one of the first cases of open source software funded by a consortium of companies.
It was during the early 1990s that the first of many complete operating systems were created using open source software. Both 386BSD, which was developed by Bill Jolitz in California and GNU/Linux, developed in Finland by Linus Torvalds were the results of community collaboration.
In 1993 both 386BSD and GNU/Linux were very stable platforms to work on. Since then, both of these operating systems have evolved into families of individual software packages. 386BSD has been responsible for various versions such as NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Similarly GNU/Linux has seen products such as Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake.
During the 1990s, an abundance of open source software had been released which dispelled the common myth that open source software was mainly focused on server and developer-oriented systems. Popular projects such as Apache (a widely used web server), Perl (an interpreted language with an abundance of libraries) and Mozilla (the free software project funded by Netscape to build a WWW browser) are not only licensed under the GPL but are also of an extremely high standard, excelling in both user friendliness and efficency.
It was only during the late 1990s that open source software started to gain public acceptance, in many cases becoming real alternatives to proprietary systems and competing head to head with market leaders (such as Windows NT for servers). In many industries, companies have already started using open source software for their IT systems, a good example being the Apache web server which currently has a market share above 50%.
