We're briefly going to run through the history of open source software. While the term open source software dates back only to 1998, the concept of freely sharing the source through various applications, programs, hardware device, drivers, et cetera, dates back to at least the 1950's in the early years of the computer age. In the 1950's, most software arose from both corporate and academic environments, it was often very strongly coupled to the hardware, and was generally not distributed by itself, it was distributed with the binaries. It wasn't seen as a separate commodity, and licensing was sloppy. One reason for the fact that the source was distributed is that there was many different platforms that people ran on, they had different compilers, different operating systems, and the concept of distributing binaries just was not practical at all. In the 1960's, there were rapid advances in computer science, as well as rapid advances in hardware. These developed both in academic institutions, such as MIT and Berkeley, and very important early research labs, particularly Bell Labs and Xerox. The Internet was born in 1968 with the beginning of ARPANET, and the Unix operating system began in 1969. Linux is a direct descendant of Unix. In the 1970's, some of the first important open source software projects were released, some of which still survive today. Emacs was written by Richard Stallman as a text editor, and Richard Stallman has been a very important figure in the history of Open Source. He's the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project. In 1978, the first version of TeX, the most advanced typesetting system, was released by Donald Knuth, and it's still an extremely wide used and has developed into many different forms and many different usages. The 1980's continued the explosion of the Internet and of open source software in general. There started to be good arenas for widespread discussion online such as Usenet. The GNU project was announced to provide alternatives to Unix software that were freely available, the X Window System which provided the graphical desktop basis for almost all Linux distributions until very recently was released, and then many advances from the Free Software Foundation, including GCC, the compiler that's used for many languages today on many platforms. In the 1990's, a student in Finland, Linus Torvalds, asked for some help in creating a new operating system and that was the birth of Linux. The Python language was released in 1992, other variants of open operating systems, such as 386BSD, were released. The Debian distribution was begun, it was the largest non-commercial Linux distribution and still is, it has more packages and contributors than any other Linux form, as well as other kinds of BSD. Red Hat was released as the first distribution company to actually succeed as a corporate entity. Further later in the decade, there were many more important products released we still use today, such as the Ruby language, the Apache web server, which is the largest market share of web servers in the world, both the KDE and GNOME desktops are released. The Netscape browser began a pattern that became common later of a closed source proprietary platform releasing its source, so that other people could see it and contribute to it. This, of course later, became Firefox, and OpenOffice, a full featured office suite that was available across many operating systems eventually was released, and today it has forked into LibreOffice, which is the form that's used on most Linux distributions, if not all. Then it just continues into the 2000's, this is just a list of some of the major events, such as the birth of Ubuntu and Firefox. The Git source control system that we'll talk about in detail later was released in 2005. Android, which is based on Linux kernel, was released in 2007, and today the largest number of phones in the world are based on Android, and the Chrome browser, its predecessor was released. So, that's just a brief review of some of the major milestones in the history of open source software. There are many more that we could have talked about.
