Ron Bongo on the history and evolution of the Open Source movement:

Much has already been discussed hereabout open source and how it can be used and be beneficial to your business. Let’s slow down a bit and go back to how the open source movement evolved from a business standpoint.

Contrary to what people may think,the open source movement already appeared in some form during the 60s and the70s, an era where the focus was more on computer architecture and hardware.Software was relegated to scientists and technicians, a community that often share their intellectual work without any strict legal hindrances, for the sole purpose of getting feedback that would help improve software and allow new machines to be more acceptable to end users.

The emergence of higher level programming languages in the 1980s also paved the emergence of proprietary software, as more companies enforced intellectual property rights to their software, even though other firms, researchers and developers contributed to its development in the past. This practice eventually broke the circle of collaboration and sharing in the IT community except for some sectors that resisted these restrictions on source code sharing.

This includes University of California in Berkeley’s Computer Systems Research Group which released their Berkeley Software Distribution license, which allowed the use of their source code for both open source use or closed proprietary systems. Another prominent voice in the open source movement was Richard Stallman who built a community working on the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, which allowed developers to share their work without the risk of getting their work locked by software companies as proprietary properties. It was here that the GNU GPL license emerged as well as other BSD-like permissive licenses. 

The Internet explosion during the1990s paved the way for more mass collaborations in open source projects. Communities readily accept all members who wish to participate in certain projects without enforcing them to work on strict time frames and commitments. This brought a larger number of contributors willing to participate in such collaborative projects and the rise of the Internet overcame the geographical boundaries that prevented such collaborations to occur in the past. This gave rise to various free software projects, most of which were truly inspired and produced superb products that could rival or even surpass the features presented by proprietary software.

Now, these products are used by a growing number of end users and businesses that saw the potential of using open source materials for their own systems and architecture. To learn more about the benefits of open source and how it can help your business or profession come and visit this blog as brought to you by Ron Bongo.