History of Free and Open-source Software - Early Information Sharing

Early Information Sharing

The concept of free sharing of technological information existed long before computers. For example, cooking recipes have been shared since the beginning of human culture. Open source can pertain to businesses and to computers, software and technology.

In the early years of automobile development, a group of capital monopolists owned the rights to a 2-cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B. Selden. By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands, or risk a lawsuit. In 1911, independent automaker Henry Ford won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden patent became virtually worthless and a new association (which would eventually become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) was formed. The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all US auto manufacturers: although each company would develop technology and file patents, these patents were shared openly and without the exchange of money between all the manufacturers. By the time the US entered World War 2, 92 Ford patents and 515 patents from other companies were being shared between these manufacturers, without any exchange of money (or lawsuits).

Software communities that can now be compared with today's free-software community existed for a long time before the free-software movement and the term "free software". According to Richard Stallman, the software-sharing community at MIT existed for "many years" before he got involved in 1971. In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by computer science academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration. As such, it was generally distributed under the principles of openness and co-operation long established in the fields of academia, and was not seen as a commodity in itself. At this time, source code, the human-readable form of software, was generally distributed with the software itself because users frequently modified the software themselves, because it would not run on different hardware or OS without modification, and also to fix bugs or add new functionality.

The A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953, was released to customers with its source code. They were invited to send their improvements back to UNIVAC. Thus it is believed that A-2 was the first example of free and open-source software.

An IBM mainframe operating system, Airline Control Program (ACP), from 1967 reportedly distributed its source code in a way very similar to the way free software is now. User groups such as that of the IBM 701, called SHARE, and that of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), called DECUS were formed to facilitate the exchange of software.

Thus in this era, software was free in a sense, not because of any concerted effort by software users or developers, but rather because of necessity and a differing academic culture, as well as compatibility and porting requirements. Users also feared that close sourced programs would contain backdoors that granted the distributor attack to their system, as security mechanisms were virtually nonexistent. Software logging was not prevalent on any major operating systems, and it was impossible to see what a software was doing.

By the late 1960s change was coming: as operating systems and programming language compilers evolved, software production costs were dramatically increasing. A growing software industry was competing with the hardware manufacturers' bundled software products (the cost of bundled products was included in the hardware cost), leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of manufacturer's software to be bundled with hardware product costs. In the United States vs. IBM antitrust suit, filed January 17, 1969, the U.S. government charged that bundled software was anticompetitive. While some software continued to come at no cost, there was a growing amount of software that was for sale only under restrictive licences.

Very similar to open standards, researchers with access to Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a process called Request for Comments to develop telecommunication network protocols. This collaborative process of the 1960s led to the birth of the Internet in 1969.

In the early 1970s AT&T distributed early versions of UNIX at no cost to government and academic researchers, but these versions did not come with permission to redistribute or to distribute modified versions, and were thus not free software in the modern meaning of the phrase. After UNIX became more widespread in the early 1980s, AT&T stopped the free distribution and charged for system patches. As it is quite difficult to switch to another architecture, most researchers paid for a commercial license.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, computer vendors and software-only companies began routinely charging for software licences, marketing it as "Program Products" and imposing legal restrictions on new software developments, now seen as assets, through copyrights, trademarks, and leasing contracts. In 1976 Bill Gates wrote an essay entitled Open Letter to Hobbyists, in which he expressed dismay at the widespread sharing of Altair BASIC by hobbyists without paying its licensing fee. In 1979, AT&T began to enforce its licences when the company decided it might profit by selling the Unix system.

Some free software which was developed in the 70s and early 80s which continues to be used includes SPICE, TeX (developed by Donald Knuth), and the X Window System.