The history of Free and Open Source Software, for the ‘Third Generation’
In this article, we look at what is FOSS, and looks at a brief history of the movement, for those who weren’t born during the era of domination of proprietary software.
Introduction
By now, the concept of FOSS (Free and Open Source) is something that is widely acknowledged by many people in the tech industry. By now, many people who aspire for a career or have a passion for computers and programming would have heard of this term, even used some open source products. But there was a time when the concept of open source itself was considered a bad idea, and the preference towards proprietary software was stronger. The reason being fairly obvious: those who owned the software could mint money off it from those who did not.
The earliest reference to people who shared software amongst themselves was a letter by William H. Gates in his “An Open Letter to Hobbyists”.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal
your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS
for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software.The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested
a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
Here, the people working on open source are called hobbyists and considered thieves.
While writing about the history of FOSS, the author Christopher Tozzi proposed to divide people who use open software across three generations:
The first was the Richard Stallman generation, which founded the free software movement in the 1980s. They built GNU and the FSF, which made it possible a decade later for Linux-based operating systems to function. They also tended to view free software as a moral crusade, and they remained relatively marginal within the mainstream technology world.
The second generation was the one that came of age with the Linux kernel. They were the first to have access to free/open source (I know, I am not properly nuancing these terms right now — sorry) operating systems that actually worked by combining Linus Torvalds’s free kernel with GNU utilities.
The second generation was less ideological than the first. Torvalds and his cohorts favored open source primarily for functional, not moral, reasons. They saw it as a more efficient way to code, and a less expensive means of working with computers. But they were still independent, and wary of becoming corporate minions.
And if you can notice the flow, the people who adopted FOSS technology in the last few years (yours truly included) belong to the third generation:
Then there is the third generation of open source programmers. They are the ones who came of age once GNU/Linux was already the defacto operating system for millions of servers, at a time when no one questioned the value of open source code. For this generation, open source is no longer an argument. It’s a default.
For that reason, the ideological and functionalist debates have largely disappeared from the scene. Most open source programmers today do not give away code because they think it is the morally right thing to do, or because they deem it more efficient. They do it because there is no real alternative in an increasing number of niches. From the cloud (where OpenStack reigns supreme) to big data (where Hadoop, Spark and a host of NoSQL databases are now conquering the proprietary holdouts) to SDN and NFV, open source dominates. If you want to work in these ecosystems, you have to use open source.
While you can argue about the semantics (the broad boundary separating each generation), this actually gives a fairly accurate rationale explaining each type of person’s attitude towards usage of FOSS products.
But wait, what exactly is free and open software?
This is the sort of questions we still see today, not just from those just introduced to the concept, but also there exists misconceptions amongst those who use it too! A key point to note: free and open terms have separate and equally important significance.
Open source software is software whose source code is freely available. This is often falsely equated with the concept of “free” software, software which you can use without paying. Open source is a big deal because it allows the user to examine exactly how the program works. Programmers might want to check how the code runs or to verify the working of the code.
Free open source software goes much further in that it allows a software developer to take its code, modify it, create new code, and then sell that product.
The word free here can be confusing in it’s use. A popular thumb-rule applied is: ‘Free as in freedom, not free beer’- implying you can still pay for free and open software, but you have freedom to view and modify source code. With that probably clear in our minds, we can look at the history of how FOSS came into the mainstream.
History of FOSS
With the rise of personal computers in the early 70’s, there was a boom in the people who started getting involved in the software industry. With hardware and software products separated, software as such was ready to develop as a market. But many software vendors were concerned about the viability of this market, as it was unclear which legal protection they would receive. As a result of which, a consensus emerged amongst lawmakers and lobbyists to copyright software. The US and Europe were quick to adopt these laws, wherein each copy of the software was treated as a book: the vendors got a royalty of each copy sold. But between the lines of the law, there were a few things that got many frustrated with proprietary software.
For one, while software was sold as a ‘book’ by the vendors, they did not actually sell the software. They included long legal documents that solemnly declared that the software was merely licensed and that the user had no rights other than as provided in this license. There were restrictions on the right to reverse engineer a program. That is, I cannot look at the program, deconstruct it, and clone a program with the features I feel will improve it.
As a general rule, buyers of a product are expected and permitted to examine what they buy and to discover how it works, but nothing beyond that.
The big problem in this scenario here is, I cannot find out how to fix a bug when it arises. I have to go to the vendor, who can access the code, and they will charge me for maintenance fees for fixing that bug.
As a result, companies started closing out their source code to the outside world, treating it as their intellectual property. This frustrated MIT hacker, Richard M Stallman, to a great extent and felt that this ‘hoarding’ of software cannot be allowed. Another trigger for the FOSS movement was when a company called Symbolics took an open source language called LISP (used by MIT Artificial Labs) and then made it proprietary. These laid the seeds for the FSF (Free Software Foundation).
Stallman was credited with creating the alternative to copyright: copyleft. Essentially, what he did was create GNU General Public License or GPL, a software license that allows anyone to freely use, distribute and adapt the licensed software at no charge. The caveat being that any modification of the source code under this license could only be distributed under that license. This ensured the continued availability of the source code to anyone who came in contact with the software. This was a great success as Stallman collaborating with others, created most of the software required to run a general purpose computer- with one glaring omission: The Kernel.
But that was resolved in 1991, when Finnish computer student Linus Torvalds built Linux (Linus+UNIX) as a ‘hobby’. This proved to be a major step forward for the FOSS movement. The development of Linux was strengthened by the lawsuit involving BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), which was essentially an extension of Unix OS, and the owners of Unix (AT&T).
Companies were reluctant to invest in free software, due to the stiff resistance by the ‘first generation’ of FOSS developers who had developed animosity towards those who still used proprietary software. It was not until 1998, when Netscape announced that it would release the source code of its Web browser. This spurred a group of prominent free software developers to promote free software principles under the newly-coined term “open source”: collaboration between programmers world-wide who jointly improve software in a way that no individual company could achieve. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was subsequently founded as a public benefit corporation, which amongst other things offers a certification program for open source software licenses.
People still weren’t satisfied with the open source community as they focused on community driven development rather than freeing up code to be open to all. It was in this backdrop that FOSS, a more neutral term encompassing both free and open software was developed. FLOSS introduces the Libre concept, where free is clarified as freedom rather than free beer.
This wraps up a ‘brief’ history of FOSS. Next time, we look at famous lawsuits that have taken place over the last few years, which strengthened the legitimacy of FOSS movement in people’s eyes.
We at FOSSMEC want to bring quality articles to keep you up to date with the happenings of the world of free and open source software. Follow us to keep updated about our articles! Till then, see you next time!
