A Brief History of Open Source Software

Everyone who uses a computer today relies on open source software (OSS) today. Millions of people contribute to the code itself. Indeed, a substantial percentage of the users and creators of OSS today are young enough to have never known a world that didn’t rely on OSS. In other words, it’s very easy to take this remarkable product of open collaboration for granted. But that would be a mistake, especially given how unlikely it seemed in the beginning that such a unique phenomenon could ever have taken hold. If you’ve never had reason to wonder about how all this came about, this three part series is for you. In it, I’ll review how remote developers began to collaborate to create OSS, how the legal tools to make its distribution possible evolved, and how the world came to embrace it.