Detailed · 12 events
A History of Open Source and Free Software
1960s
01 events
Unknown (via Jargon File, Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ Having left the Multics project, Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Labs began writing a small timesharing system on an idle PDP-7. Initially an experiment for one user, it gained a second when Dennis Ritchie joined; in 1970 it was named UNICS (later UNIX). Its rewrite in the C language (1972) gave it portability, and the operating-system lineage that followed has dominated the next half-century. Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS all descend from it.
- Related people
- Ken Thompson · Dennis Ritchie
- Related organizations
- Bell Labs
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Operating Systems
1970s
01 events
Poul-Henning Kamp (Wikimedia Commons) · Beerware License · Commons ↗ The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley released the First Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD)—a collection of enhancements to AT&T Bell Labs' UNIX V6, edited largely by Bill Joy. The tape, containing the ex editor and a Pascal compiler, shipped in around thirty copies. From here flowed the 4BSD line, SunOS, FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD, and the Darwin kernel underneath macOS. The 1991-1994 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.
- Related organizations
- Bell Labs
1980s
01 events
Ruben Rodriguez (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0 · Commons ↗ Richard Stallman of the MIT AI Lab posted 'Free Unix!' to the Usenet groups net.unix-wizards and net.usoft, announcing GNU (GNU's Not Unix), a UNIX-compatible system he would write from scratch and release in a freely redistributable form. The Free Software Foundation followed in 1985, GPLv1 in 1989, and GPLv2 in 1991—the licence the Linux kernel would adopt, 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
05 events
Lukas Schulze / SPORTSFILE (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki, posted to comp.os.minix: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)." The first sources ran to about 10,000 lines, indebted to Minix but written as an independent kernel. Released under the GPL in 1992, it grew through contributions from developers worldwide; by 2026, Linux is the kernel at the core of most of the world's servers, smartphones, and supercomputers.
- Related people
- Linus Torvalds
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Operating Systems
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA at the University of Illinois built the first major web browser that displayed text and images inline on the same page. Distributed free for Windows, Mac, and UNIX, it took the Web out of research labs and put it in front of ordinary users almost overnight. Andreessen co-founded Netscape the following year, opening the commercial web era.
Marc Andreessen, the lead behind Mosaic, and Jim Clark co-founded Netscape Communications, which shipped its commercial web browser, Navigator 1.0. The August 1995 IPO tripled in price on the first day; it is often cited as the formal start of the dot-com bubble. Acquired by AOL in 1998 after losing the browser war to Internet Explorer, but the Netscape codebase—released as open source—became the origin of Mozilla and Firefox.
- Appears in
- A 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 release the source code of its flagship product, Netscape Communicator. The code shipped on 31 March and mozilla.org was set up the same day to coordinate the new project. It was the first serious example of a flagship commercial product being open-sourced; Eric Raymond's essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is widely credited with influencing the decision. From here flowed the Mozilla Suite, Mozilla 1.0 (2002), Firefox 1.0 (2004), and today's Mozilla Foundation / Corporation structure.
2000s
02 events
Jason Long (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 3.0 · Commons ↗ When BitKeeper—then used by Linux kernel development—revoked its free licence, Linus Torvalds designed and implemented his own distributed version-control system. Work began on 3 April 2005; the first self-hosting commit landed on 7 April; on 20 April the Linux kernel itself moved to Git. The whole thing took about ten days. 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.
- Related people
- Linus Torvalds
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 2024 GitHub reported 150 million users and 420 million repositories, having become the de facto public infrastructure of modern software development.
2010s
01 eventsMicrosoft completed the acquisition of GitHub—the developer code-sharing and collaboration service—through a stock-for-stock deal. The transaction marked the complete reversal from the 1990s Microsoft that had argued 'open source is theft of intellectual property'. GitHub continued to operate independently, evolving toward an AI-integrated platform with Copilot in 2021 and Copilot Chat in 2023.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Microsoft
2020s
01 events
Dbeef / 0xDeadbeef (Wikimedia Commons) · CC0 1.0 (Public domain dedication) · Commons ↗ Linus Torvalds merged initial Rust support into the Linux 6.1 release. Since 1973, the Linux kernel had effectively been C-only; this was the historic moment at which Rust—with its memory-safety guarantees—was formally admitted into kernel development. Expansion began with device drivers and, from 2024, accelerated into Apple Silicon GPU drivers, NVMe, and filesystem layers. The transition was not smooth: in 2024 the so-called 'Rust for Linux' conflict pitted some conservative C maintainers against Rust advocates—a symbol of a generational shift in the software culture around language choice.
- Related people
- Linus Torvalds
- Appears in
- A History of Programming Languages · A History of Operating Systems