Fearless Innovation

Chapter 6Innovation Wants to Be Free

Though the idea of open source began in the 1970s, the movement itself didn’t gain much mainstream notoriety until around 2001, the year that Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft at the time, called open-source software, specifically Linux, a “cancer.”¹ Linux, started by Linus Torvalds in the 1990s, was an “open-source” computer operating system, one that made corporate America nervous and a lot of software developers and computer scientists excited. Open source is both a description of a type of computer software and a philosophy, in which the freedom to share information is valued above all else—in this case computer code and free programs that can be developed, built upon, improved, and redistributed.

It all began with the Internet, born as a project funded by the US Department of Defense that quickly moved into the domain of academia, an environment in which a free sharing of knowledge and ideas is encouraged. Not long after the World Wide Web was invented by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who was then a fellow at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the concept of free data sharing was applied to software, leading to the growth of the open-source movement. Open-source pioneers were often seen as “mad scientists” or fringe characters, but in reality, the ideas they were developing and the software they were sharing with millions around the world were the beginning of an innovation mindset and concept that would ...