How Open Source Ate Software: Understand the Open Source Movement and So Much More

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

G. HaffHow Open Source Ate Softwarehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6800-1_1

1. The Beginnings of Free and Open Source Software

Gordon Haff¹  

(1)

Lancaster, MA, USA

 

Origin stories are often messy. What you are about to read is no exception.

The story of open source software is a maze of twisty streams feeding into each other and into the main channel. They’re part and parcel with the history of the Unix operating system, which itself is famously convoluted. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at open source’s humble beginnings.

In the Beginning

The sharing of human-readable source code was widespread in the early days of computing. A lot of computer development ...