Introduction to Free Software - SELF | Sharing Knowledge about ...

© FUOC • P07/M2101/02709 16 Free Software
2. A bit of history
"When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part
of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software
was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of
recipes is as old as cooking. But we did it more than most. [...] We did not call our software
free software, because that term did not yet exist; but that is what it was. Whenever people
from another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly
let them. If you saw someone using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could
always ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or cannibalize
parts of it to make a new program."
"When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a
software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing software was not
limited to our particular community: it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes
is as old as cooking. But we did it more than most. [...] We did not call our software free
software because that term did not yet exist; but that is what it was. Whenever people
from another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly
let them. If you saw someone using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could
always ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or cannibalise
parts of it to make a new program."
Richard Stallman, "The GNU Project" (originally published in the book Open sources) [208]
Although all the histories associated to IT are necessarily brief, free software's
is one of the longest. In fact, we could say that in the beginning almost all
developed software fulfilled the definition of free software , even though the
concept didn't even exist yet. Later the situation changed completely, and pri-
vate software dominated the scene, almost exclusively, for a fairly long time.
It was during that period that the foundations were laid for free software as we
know it today, and when bit by bit free programs started to appear. Over time,
these beginnings grew into a trend that has progressed and matured to the
present day, when free software is a possibility worth considering in virtually
all spheres.
This history is largely unknown, to such an extent that for many IT professi-
onals private software is software "in its natural state". However, the situation
is rather the opposite and the seeds of change that could first be discerned in
the first decade of the 21st century had already been sown in the early 1980s.
Bibliography
There are not many detailed histories of free software, and the ones that there are, are
usually articles limited to their main subject. In any case, interested readers can extend
their knowledge of what we have described in this chapter by reading "Open Source Initiative.
History of the OSI" [146] (http://www.opensource.org/docs/history.php), which
emphasises the impact of free software on the business community in the years 1998
and 1999; "A brief history of free/open source software movement" [190], by Chris Rasch,
which covers the history of free software up until the year 2000, or "The origins and future
of open source software" (1999) [177], by Nathan Newman, which focuses to a large
extent on the US Government's indirect promotion of free software or similar systems
during the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s.