The Open Source Alternative: Understanding Risks and Leveraging Opportunities

Chapter 1. Introduction: How UNIX Gave Birth to Linux, and a New Software Paradigm

Lawyers and businesspeople who are first learning about open source tend to think of it as an entirely new paradigm, or a disruptive technology. But open source is easier to understand within its historical context. It is true that open source software licensing is the biggest sea change in technology licensing since software licensing began. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. This chapter outlines the historical background for the free software movement and the later open source movement, and explains why and how they arose.

In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word Was Unix

The term "open source" refers primarily to a type of outbound licensing paradigm, but also to a method of software development. Although media attention to both of these aspects of open source has burgeoned in the last decade, both the licensing paradigm and the development method have been in use ever since modern software was developed.

Although there are many software applications and utilities licensed under open source schemes, the "killer app" of open source is the Linux operating system.^[1] Understanding the free software movement of the 1990s without understanding UNIX is a little like trying to understand Martin Luther without knowing who the pope is—you may learn the doctrines of Protestantism, but they will seem arbitrary if you do not know their historical context. The philosophical tenets of ...