Detailed · 12 events
A History of Open Source and Free Software
1960s
1970s
Poul-Henning Kamp (Wikimedia Commons) · Beerware License · Commons ↗ The First Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD), assembled from 1977 by the Berkeley graduate student Bill Joy, went out as a tape. It was an add-on to AT&T Bell Labs' Sixth Edition UNIX, not an operating system in its own right: the Pascal system, with the ex editor tucked into a subdirectory of the Pascal source. About thirty copies shipped over the following year. From here flowed vi and the C shell in 2BSD, TCP/IP and sockets in 4.2BSD, SunOS, FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD, and the foundations of macOS. The 1992-1994 USL v. BSDi lawsuit, settled out of court, ultimately shaped the modern premise that the right to redistribute source code can be guaranteed by licence.
1980s
Ruben Rodriguez (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0 · Commons ↗ Richard Stallman of the MIT AI Lab posted to the Usenet groups net.unix-wizards and net.usoft under the subject 'new UNIX implementation'; the body opened 'Free Unix!' and announced GNU (GNU's Not Unix), a UNIX-compatible system he would write from scratch and give away freely. Work actually began in January 1984; the GNU Manifesto and the Free Software Foundation both followed in 1985, GPLv1 in 1989, GPLv2 in 1991—the licence the Linux kernel adopted in 1992, fusing GNU and Linux into the substrate of the modern open-source economy. The origin point of free software as both philosophy and legal apparatus.
1990s
- EVT.004T1Linux — Linus Torvalds' 21-Year-Old AnnouncementA History of Operating SystemsA General History of Information TechnologyRead more →
- EVT.005T2NCSA Mosaic — A Web Browser That Showed ImagesA History of the Internet and the WebA General History of Information Technology
- EVT.006T2Netscape Navigator 1.0 ReleasedA History of the Internet and the Web
Apache Software Foundation (Wikimedia Commons) · Apache License 2.0 · Commons ↗ After development of the NCSA HTTPd stalled, eight web administrators—led by Brian Behlendorf—formed a group to maintain and extend the server, releasing Apache HTTP Server 0.6.2 in April 1995. The name came from its origin as a set of patches to NCSA HTTPd: 'a patchy server'. By 1996 Apache had the largest market share of any web server, a position it would hold for more than two decades. The Apache Software Foundation followed in 1999; the Apache License 2.0 (2004) became one of the most widely adopted permissive licences in open source.
Mozilla Foundation (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 3.0 / MPL 2.0 · Commons ↗ Cornered by Internet Explorer, Netscape Communications announced that it would publish the source of the next-generation Communicator and make its current client free the same day. mozilla.org launched on 23 February; the code itself shipped on 31 March under the Netscape Public License 1.0, with MPL 1.0 for new files. It was the first serious example of a flagship commercial product being open-sourced, and Netscape's own CTO credited Eric Raymond's essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' as an inspiration for the decision. From here flowed the Mozilla Suite, Mozilla 1.0 (2002), Firefox 1.0 (2004), and today's Mozilla Foundation / Corporation structure.
2000s
Jason Long (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 3.0 · Commons ↗ When BitKeeper—then used by Linux kernel development—stopped supplying its free version, Linus Torvalds designed and implemented his own distributed version-control system. Work began on 3 April 2005; the first commit landed on 7 April; on 16 April the Linux kernel tree (2.6.12-rc2) was imported into Git. Thirteen days, or in Torvalds' own words about ten. The design—content-addressed objects keyed by SHA-1, cheap branches, fully distributed repositories—became the standard, the substrate of GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, and an indispensable layer of modern software development.
GitHub (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0 · Commons ↗ On 10 April 2008, Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon launched GitHub to the public (the private beta began in February 2008). By hiding the difficulty of Git's command line behind a web UI and adding social primitives—Pull Request, Fork, Issue, Star—GitHub dramatically accelerated open-source development, discovery, and adoption. Microsoft acquired the company for US$7.5 billion in 2018 (see github-acquisition-2018). By the end of 2024 GitHub reported 150 million developers and 518 million projects, having become the de facto public infrastructure of modern software development.
2010s
- EVT.011T3Microsoft Acquires GitHub for US$7.5 BillionA History of Microsoft