History of Free & Open Source SoftwareCopy Anchor Link

Sharing source code is older than the industry that stopped doing it. The story runs from a 1950s norm of open exchange, through a decade in which software became property, to a deliberate legal-political response — and, forty years later, to a world where the argument has moved to cloud vendors and AI weights.

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1. The era of sharing (1950s–1970s)Copy Anchor Link

Early software came with the hardware, and source code travelled with it. IBM's SHARE user group distributed programs openly; DEC's PDP users swapped tapes; university labs patched and returned. There was little to sell — code was a service attached to a machine.

ARPANET (1969) extended the habit. The Request for Comments series became the working model for open, contested, incremental standardisation — the direct ancestor of how IETF, Python PEPs and Kubernetes KEPs work today.

Unix, written at Bell Labs from 1969, was distributed to universities with source. Ken Thompson's "Caveat emptor" note on the Version 6 tape is one of the earliest informal no-warranty disclaimers.

2. Software becomes property (late 1970s–1980s)Copy Anchor Link

Three things changed the norm at once:

• The US Computer Software Copyright Act (1980) clarified that software was copyrightable.
• Unix began to be treated as a product after AT&T was permitted to commercialise it (from 1979, more aggressively after the 1984 divestiture).
• The microcomputer market created a mass market for shrink-wrapped binaries.

The trigger for the movement is famously mundane: a printer. When Xerox stopped supplying source for the driver on MIT's new laser printer, Richard Stallman could not fix it — and concluded that withholding source was a moral failing. He had also watched Symbolics hire away MIT's Lisp machine hackers and ship a proprietary fork.

3. GNU and the Free Software FoundationCopy Anchor Link

By 1991 GNU had GCC, Emacs, a debugger, a shell and a C library — everything except a working kernel. GNU Hurd stalled; the gap was filled from an unexpected direction.

4. The BSD branch and the Unix warsCopy Anchor Link

Berkeley's BSD (1977 onward) gave the world the TCP/IP stack most of the internet ran on, the vi/csh/sendmail toolset, and a permissive licence that let companies take the code proprietary.

AT&T's lawsuit against BSDi (1992, settled 1994) is why 4.4BSD-Lite exists and why FreeBSD (1993) and NetBSD/OpenBSD (1993/1995) exist. It also established a durable cultural split: BSD says do anything, just don't sue us and don't claim endorsement; GPL says if you distribute it, you keep it free.

5. Linux and the kernelCopy Anchor Link

The governance lesson — one trusted lieutenant with a distributed review network — is still the model most large projects copy.

6. 1998: the "open source" rebrandCopy Anchor Link

Netscape's January 1998 announcement that it would release the Mozilla source code prompted a strategy session in Palo Alto (February 1998). The conclusion: "free software" was losing the argument with business because it sounded anti-commercial. The term open source was proposed by Christine Peterson; the Open Source Initiative was founded by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens; the Open Source Definition was the Debian Free Software Guidelines with the Debian references removed.

Same licences, different frame. Stallman maintained the distinction for decades: open source is a development methodology, free software is a political movement.

The timing was perfect. The dot-com boom funded Linux companies (Red Hat's IPO August 1999; VA Linux December 1999), Apache became the dominant web server, and MySQL, PHP and Perl formed LAMP.

7. The internet decade (2000–2007)Copy Anchor Link

• 2001 — IBM invests ~$1B in Linux; open source becomes respectable to the enterprise.
• 2004-11 — Firefox 1.0; a community project ships consumer software.
• 2005-04 — Git, after BitKeeper's free licence was withdrawn; written in about ten days.
• 2005–2007 — the GPLv3 process: four public drafts, thousands of comments.
• 2007-06-29 — GPLv3 (patent peace, anti-tivoisation) and, in November, AGPLv3.

8. Cloud, GitHub and corporate captureCopy Anchor Link

GitHub (April 2008) lowered the cost of contributing to "click fork, edit, pull request". Android (2008) put a Linux kernel in a billion pockets. Cloud computing created the central tension of the modern era: hosting a service is not distribution, so the GPL's copyleft trigger never fires — which is why AGPL and, later, source-available licences exist.

Microsoft went from calling Linux a "cancer" (2001) to joining the Linux Foundation (2016) and acquiring GitHub for $7.5B (2018). Kubernetes 1.0 (2015) and the CNCF established the pattern: a company starts a project, donates it to a foundation, and monetises around it.

9. The licence wars (2018–present)Copy Anchor Link

The lesson for users: a licence can change, and a fork is the remedy. Every one of these events produced a Linux-Foundation-backed fork within weeks.

10. Supply chain, AI and regulationCopy Anchor Link

The through-line: the technical argument was won long ago. What is contested now is money — who funds maintenance — and machine learning, where "open" is being redefined faster than the licences can keep up.

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See also: Licenses · Governance · Business models · Security & supply chain