Contribute to Open Source Projects

Contributed by Charles Humble

Difficulty level: Easy

Open source software (OSS) has become such a mainstay of our industry that it is easy to forget it was once a radical idea. Until the late 1960s, large and expensive mainframe computers were generally leased to customers and supplied with all the software needed to run them. In 1969, IBM led an industry change by starting to charge separately for mainframe software.

Seven years later, Bill Gates’ Open Letter to Hobbyists asserted that the rampant unauthorized use of Microsoft’s Altair BASIC interpreter hindered his ability to produce quality software. In 1983, binary software became copyrightable in the United States.

The free software movement grew throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it was the arrival of the Netscape browser in 1998 that saw the movement garner mainstream attention. Netscape released the code for its browser, Christine Peterson coined the term “open source,” and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) became a focal point for their efforts. They formally define OSS as being software that is released under a license that grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.

Microsoft, in particular, was horrified. Bill Gates’ famous Internet Tidal Wave memo suggests the browser wars were largely caused by a fear that Netscape would render Windows obsolete. I suspect they were also concerned that if all software ...