Rise of Open Source

 The Rise of Open Source

The open source software movement grew out of the related, but separate, "free software" movement. In 1983, Richard Stallman, at the time a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said he would create a free alternative to the Unix operating system, then owned by AT&T; Stallman dubbed his alternative GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix."

For Stallman, the idea of "free" software was about more than giving software away. It was about ensuring that users were free to use software as they saw fit, free to study its source code, free to modify it for their own purposes, and free to share it with others. Stallman released his code under a license known as the GNU Public License, or GPL, which guarantees users those four software freedoms. The GPL is a "viral" license, meaning that anyone who creates software based on code licensed under the GPL must also release that derivative code under a GPL license.

Importantly, the license doesn't forbid companies from selling copies of GNU software. As long as you allow your customers to share your code, you can charge as much as you want for your software. The phrase "free as in free speech, not free as in free beer" is often used to help explain this apparent contradiction.

Other programmers soon followed Stallman's example. One of the most important was Linus Torvalds, the vitriolic Finnish programmer who created the Linux operating system in 1991. Linux is a "kernel," the core of an operating system that talks to the hardware and translates the basic input from your keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen into something the software can understand. GNU lacked a finished kernel at the time, so many GNU users combined GNU and Linux into a functional operating system. Bundles of the GNU operating system, Linux kernel, and other tools became known as GNU/Linux distributions; some purists still refer to Linux-based operating systems as "GNU/Linux." Soon, companies like Red Hat were making money selling support for open source technologies like Linux.

Linux---or GNU/Linux if you prefer---became especially popular for running web servers and now runs 69.4 percent of web servers, according to data compiled by W3Techs. Alongside the rise of Linux and the web came several other free tools, including the Apache web server, MySQL database, and programming languages like Perl and PHP. Many used the GPL license, but others adopted more permissive licenses that, unlike the GPL, allowed companies to create proprietary products using their code.

In time, tensions grew between those, like Stallman, who believed that all software should be free on ethical grounds, and more business-oriented developers who thought that freely sharing code was a better way to build software but not an ethical imperative. In 1998, a group met to discuss how to promote the idea of shared code and open collaboration. Worried that the term “free software” and Stallman’s more absolutist philosophy would make their ideas less palatable to businesses that wanted to keep some of their code proprietary, the group settled on the label "open source," coined by Christine Peterson, to distinguish its aims.

During the 2000s, open source went truly mainstream. In 2004, programmer David Heinemeier Hansson released his web application programming framework Ruby on Rails, which quickly became one of the world’s most important web development tools, as well as the foundation for services like Twitter and Kickstarter. Meanwhile, Yahoo was funding the development of the open source data-crunching system Hadoop. After its release in 2006, other companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and eBay began contributing to the project, helping demonstrate the value of inter-company collaboration. Sun Microsystems' $1 billion acquisition of MySQL in 2008 proved open source could be big business. That same year Google released its first Android phones, moving open source from the server to your pocket.

Now open source is practically everywhere. Walmart uses open source software like the development platform Node, and it has opened up the code of its cloud management tool OneOps and its development platform Electrode. JP Morgan Chase open sourced its blockchain platform Quorum, on which its employees collaborated with the creators of the privacy focused bitcoin alternative Zcash. Even Microsoft, whose former CEO once called Linux a "cancer," now uses and releases open source software such as its popular .NET programming framework. It even uses Linux to run parts of its cloud service Azure and has shared its own Linux tools with the community.

Open source isn’t counterculture anymore. It’s the establishment.