A brief history of Open-Source. Why is it important?

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 Much of the software code that powers some of the biggest companies in this world is open to the public. Anyone can download the source code behind Facebook's user interface, Google android's operating system, or even the Goldman Sachs data modeling program. Developers can use this available code as a building block for an entirely new project. Open-source developers can collaborate and help each other walk through the process of developing software and in this collaborative work, they form groups, organizations, code pods, and families. This network of developers get together and produce open-source software for free of charge. These are volunteer developers who are not promised any monetary compensation for their work. Fierce commercial rivals, tech giants, all contribute to the open-source community without signing anything. 



The open-source software model hasn't always been around. When the internet was first rising to fame, proprietary software was popular. Bill Gates was against the idea of open source and thought little of the Linux operating system. Microsoft believed that the open-source idea was un-American, unhealthy for the software development community, and bad for intellectual property rights. Fast forward two decades, Microsoft is now considered to be a leader in the open-source community. Open-source is so integrated into the world of consumers now that the US government promised to open source 20% of all its new custom-developed code. 

The start of open-source:

In the 1970s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) artificial intelligence lab had a printer that regularly jammed. Staff programmer, Richard Stallman altered its source code so that it would send out an alert every time it malfunctioned for someone to check and fix it. 
When the lab finally got a new printer, Stallman found out that the code was inaccessible and requested access. When denied, Stallman quit his job and started working on a new open-source operating system, The GNU operating system. With this, Stallman launched a movement that would eventually become the biggest movement in the software development world. Throughout the next two decades, open-source still hadn't found its place, and proprietary software was still in demand. 




Enter, Linux. 

In 1991, Linus Torvalds released Linux, an operating system that incorporated much of the GNU structure. As the operating system picked up momentum, many multi-national corporations started using Linux due to the flexibility it provided. By the turn of the century, NASA, Dell, and IBM, all used Linux. 

The rise of open-source: 


As Linux grew, other open-source software started gaining popularity. Database management system, MySQL is a good example of some of the early open-source developments. In 2008, Google released android devices which ran on modified versions of Linux. This operating system blew up the smartphone market. A decade later, 95% of the fortune 500 companies would be using open-source software and actively contributing to them. In 2018, Microsoft acquired Github, which hosted over 140,000,000 open source projects. 

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