American political communication scientist Laswell put forward the 5W communication mode. After continuous application and development of later generations, a set of gradually mature “5W1H” system has been formed, namely: For the selected project, process or operation, it is necessary to put forward questions from six aspects such as cause (Why), object (What), place (Where), time (When), personnel (Who), method (How) and so on.

This series of articles will take a look at open source in 5W1H. This time, Who/When/Where of open source – Who “invented” open source, When and Where?

A letter from Microsoft

Since the advent of the first computer in the last century, the computer industry has been based on the hardware business model, that is, hardware sales as the main source of income, the attached software is free and attached with source code, easy for professionals to debug and modify. Although software copyright is now considered commonplace, the laws of the time did not provide adequate protection for this new phenomenon. Later, as the popularity of personal computers increased the demand for software, a group of companies specialized in developing general-purpose software. Such software companies had to charge for software to make a profit. But charging for software is clearly incompatible with providing the source code, because as long as the source code is still available, there is nothing to prevent users or competitors from copying or rewriting the software code.

On February 3, 1976, Bill Gates published his famous “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, in which he explicitly argued that software should have “CopyRight”. This open letter laid the theoretical foundation of software product “CopyRight”, and also promoted proprietary software to become the mainstream of software industry development. The concept of “Copy Right” is bound to lead to the source code is completely closed up.

To be fair, Bill Gates’ idea of “Copy Right” and the rise of proprietary software have contributed to the software industry’s boom. However, the monopoly of the software market by Microsoft and other private software manufacturers has aroused the strong dissatisfaction of users and software developers, and the movement against the idea of private software has arisen. Open source software is an important part of this movement. The first proprietary Software Movement is the Free Software Movement, which is the forerunner of open source Software Movement.

Free software movement

Some people, most notably Richard Stallman, who started the free software movement, were uncomfortable or unhappy with the shift from free to paid software and the removal of source code. Richard was a programmer at MIT’s AI lab in the 1970s. Xerox’s printers no longer provided source code, and Richard could not fix printer glitches by modifying the code as before; Richard made the common code for the LISP compiler available to commercial companies, but the company refused to share the expanded and improved code. These two events prompted Richard to resign and become involved in the free software movement.

In 1983, Richard began the free software movement. In 1985, Stallman and others founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Stallman proposed the antithesis of the “Copy Right” concept of “Copy Left” in the form of the GPL, or General Pubic License. Free software should be software with the following four freedoms:

  • Freedom to run the software for any purpose;

  • The freedom to study how the software works and to improve it to better suit your needs;

  • Freedom to redistribute to help neighbors;

  • The freedom to have improvement procedures and publish improvements (and often revisions) to advance the interests of the community as a whole.

By 1991, the Free Software Foundation had developed most of the components of the GNU operating system (such as compilers, editors, user interfaces, etc.), but the kernel at the heart of the operating system, GNU Hurd, was still incomplete.

The task of completing the operating system kernel was led by Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old Finnish university student. For personal interest and testing purposes, Linus wrote version 0.01 of the Linux kernel in September 1991, and it didn’t even work yet. A month later, however, he wrote version 0.02, which can run various GNU components (hence Linux is often referred to as GNU Linux). After version 0.02, programmers from all over the world joined in the development of the Linux kernel, making it quickly improved. When version 0.12 was released in February 1992, Linus changed the License for the Linux kernel to GPL License Version 2, which it has maintained ever since. In March 1994, version 1.00 of the Linux kernel was developed.

It was Linux that gave the free software movement its own operating system to rival Microsoft’s Windows. The free software movement had its first success. However, the free software movement on the pursuit of freedom, after all, and the reality of the business atmosphere, with too idealistic color. This anti-business doctrine has led some people who are also opposed to proprietary software to stay away from free software. It was in this context that some former free software activists began to try to connect the ideal of free software with the real business atmosphere.

Open source software

In February 1998, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and others established an organization called Open Source Initiative (OSI) in California, aiming to promote Open Source software. To reduce ideological gaps, the word “Free” was misinterpreted as Free software. The OSI organization decided to drop the word “free” from “free Software,” use “Open Source Software” as the common name, and create its own definition of Open Source, along with its own set of licenses. According to oSS standards, open source software can use a non-copyleft permissive license that allows closed sources of derivative code under that license.

In a word, open source software is software that is open source and can be copied freely. The idea of the open source software movement is to solve practical problems, to grasp the pain points of proprietary software, and to achieve integration with business.