SHORT HISTORY OF OPEN SOURCE

• The early days: Collaborative software development is not formalized.

• 1983: Former MIT employee Richard Stallman starts the GNU project. The project has since created an enormous body of open-source software.

• 1985: Stallman forms the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a socio-political organization that promotes what it calls “free” software.

• 1991: Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds invites people to contribute to a free operating system and makes the first release of the Linux kernel software.

• 1998: The term open source is coined.

• Today: Many vendors provide support for open-source software, such as Linux distributions, which typically bundle the Linux kernel with GNU programs and a graphical interface.

SHORT HISTORY OF OPEN SOURCE