5W1H Talk about who/When/Where of open source-who "invented" open source when and where?

The American political communication scientist Laswell proposed the 5W communication model. After the continuous application and development of future generations, a set of gradually mature "5W1H" system has been formed, that is, for selected projects, processes or operations, all Questions should be raised from six aspects: reason (Why), object (What), location (Where), time (When), personnel (Who), and method (How).

This series of articles will talk about open source issues with the 5W1H system. This time, talk about the Who/When/Where of open source-who "invented" open source when and where?

A letter from Microsoft

Since the advent of the first computer in the last century, the computer industry has been a hardware-based business model, that is, hardware sales as the main source of income, the accompanying software is free of charge and comes with active code, which is convenient for professionals to debug and modify. Although software copyrights are now regarded as commonplace, the laws of the time did not give adequate protection to this new thing. Later, with the popularity of personal computers, people's demand for software expanded, and a group of companies specializing in the development of general-purpose software emerged. Such software companies need to charge for software to obtain profits. However, software charges and providing source code are obviously contradictory, because as long as the source code is still provided, users or competitors cannot be prevented from copying or rewriting the software code.

On February 3, 1976, Bill Gates published the famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists" (an open letter to computer hobbyists). In this open letter, Bill Gates clearly stated that the software should have "CopyRight" (copyright) . This open letter laid the theoretical foundation for the software product "CopyRight" and also promoted proprietary software to become the mainstream of the development of the software industry. The idea of "Copy Right" will inevitably lead to the complete closure of the source code.

Objectively speaking, Bill Gates' "Copy Right" concept and the rise of proprietary software have contributed to the prosperous software industry. However, the monopoly of the software market by Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors has caused strong dissatisfaction among users and software developers, and a movement against the concept of proprietary software has emerged. Open source software is an important part of this movement. The first private software movement that emerged was the Free Software Movement, which was the precedent of the open source software movement.

Free software movement

Some people feel uncomfortable or dissatisfied with the phenomenon of software switching from free to fee and no longer providing source code. The most famous one is Richard Stallman, who initiated the free software movement. In the 1970s, Richard worked as a programmer in MIT's AI (artificial intelligence) laboratory. Xerox printers no longer provide source code, and Richard cannot solve printer failures by modifying the code as before; Richard provided commercial companies with the public code of the LISP compiler, but the company refused to share the expanded and improved code. These two events prompted Richard to resign and devote himself to the free software movement.

In 1983, Richard began to advocate the free software movement. In 1985, Stallman and others founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Stallman put forward the concept of "Copy Left" (licensed copy right), which is diametrically opposed to the concept of "Copy Right". Its manifestation is GPL, that is, General Pubic License. Free software should be software with the following four major freedoms:

出于任何目的运行该软件的自由；
有研究该软件如何运行并加以改进使之更符合自己需要的自由；
有重新发布以帮助邻里的自由；
有改善程序，公布改进方案(以及通常的修订版)以推动整个社区利益的自由。

When the time came to 1991, the Free Software Foundation had developed most of the components of the GNU operating system (such as compilers, editors, user interfaces, etc.), but it still had not completed the core of the operating system, the GNU Hurd.

The task of completing the operating system kernel was led by a 21-year-old Finnish university student Linus Torvalds. For personal interest and testing purposes, Linus wrote the 0.01 version of the Linux kernel in September 1991, and this version of the kernel cannot even run. But one month later he wrote version 0.02, which can run various GNU components (so Linux is often called GNU Linux). After version 0.02, programmers from all over the world joined the development of the Linux kernel, making it quickly improved. When version 0.12 was released in February 1992, Linus changed the license of the Linux kernel to the second version of the GPL license, which has been maintained to this day. In March 1994, the 1.00 version of the Linux kernel was developed.

It is the emergence of Linux that makes the free software movement have its own operating system that can compete with Microsoft's Windows. The free software movement won its first battle. However, the pursuit of freedom in the free software movement, after all, is incompatible with the real business atmosphere, and has an overly idealistic color. This anti-commercial creed has made some people who originally opposed proprietary software stay away from free software. It is under this background that some of the original free software activists began to try to connect ideal free software with the real business atmosphere.

Open source software

In February 1998, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and others established an organization called the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in California, USA, aiming to promote open source software. In order to reduce the ideological gap, and the term "free" has caused misunderstanding of free software. The OSI organization decided to remove the word "free" from "free software", use "Open Source Software" as the common name, and created its own definition of open source and its own set of licenses. According to the standards of the Open Source Promotion Association, open source software can use a non-copyleft permissive license, allowing closed-source code derived from the code under the license.

In one sentence, open source software is software whose source code is open and can be freely copied. The concept of the open source software movement is more inclined to solve practical problems. It not only captures the pain points of proprietary software, but also realizes the integration with business.