Abroad, people of insight who developed early software put forward the plan of free software movement in 1984. This plan is simply unimaginable for the society with rampant interests at that time or now: software programmers should open their own products-software and its code, so that everyone can freely use, copy, distribute, study and learn. Is this the realization of capitalism on the computer?
Of course, there is a reason for the emergence of free software: to some extent, the code of software represents the core and foundation of software, and it is the lifeline of software manufacturers to make money under the concept at that time, so everyone strictly protects the code designed and written by their own companies through copyright, and many people can also maintain and obtain personal interests by adding software copyright to their own codes. Although the original intention of this copyright plan is good (protecting and encouraging creators), in modern society, many tiny imbalances will be caught and amplified. Because software copyright is closely related to personal interests, at that time, too many software developers had to add software copyright protection to their own code. After joining the copyright, others can no longer obtain the software source code for free for study and research, and even pay certain economic benefits for obtaining the software. Software is a special entity, and it is an information carrier. In modern society, the spread of information has been very rapid, and people can quickly improve their knowledge level by obtaining information, thus bringing further benefits to themselves. However, due to the transitional use of software copyright, the information flow of software knowledge has regressed, thus affecting the knowledge interests of all people engaged in the software industry because of the personal financial interests of several people.
Dissatisfied with the phenomenon that a large number of softwares were linked to money by wantonly adding copyright protection at that time, richard matthew Stallman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology first launched the free software movement (Stallman wanted to wage war on all commercial softwares so that people could enjoy them freely).
The main project of the free software movement is the famous GNU project. Because every computer user must use the operating system, and there was no free operating system at that time, Storman started a grand plan at 1984: to build a completely free and free Unix-compatible operating system GNU(GNU is not Unix! GNU is not UNIX. GNU refers to a large mammal-wildebeest.
At the beginning of the plan, no one was willing to help him. It took Stallman nearly a year to complete a GNU software-GNU Emacs (an editor, similar to an integrated development environment). EMACS is very powerful and copies can be distributed freely. Soon, EMACS spread everywhere, and people began to help EMACS add some new functions and fix mistakes. Gradually, EMACS became more and more perfect and widely used, and EMACS succeeded.
Due to the success of EMACS, in 1985, Storman established a foundation: FSF (Free Software Foundation, website: http://www.fsf.org) to raise funds to help develop GNU projects.
After its establishment, FSF has received donations and sponsorship from many manufacturers. Storman began to hire an ideal software engineer with a low salary to write free software in GNU projects, and he himself was unpaid.
1September, 985, Stroman officially published the famous gnu Declaration (http://www.gnu.org/GNU/manifesto.html), which elaborated the GNU plan in more detail.
1989, stallman and a group of lawyers drafted the widely used GNU GPL (GNU General Public License), and creatively put forward the concepts of "anti-copyright" or "copyright belongs to the left" and Copyleft.
At the same time, GCC(GNU C Compiler) in GNU project has achieved great success because of its superior performance and freedom.
By 1990, all the important components of the GNU plan have been basically found or written, and the rest is the kernel of the operating system (the writing of the kernel system is generally extremely complicated, requiring a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources, while stallman's FSF did not have the means and ability to develop it at that time).
199 1 year, Finnish college student Linus Benedict Torvalds (Linus Benedict Torvalds for short) released his own operating system kernel, named GNU GPL Linux or Linux for short. This project has won the participation and support of many developers around the world. This plan has done what commercial software thought free software could not do in the past-using scattered developers and teams, without strict management and planning, developing software as complex as kernel system through the Internet.
In terms of commercial software, people saw many good projects in the free software movement, and some people began to seek the commercialization of free software. However, Storman's free software movement emphasizes that business cannot override free software, and the software released by GNU GPL is unlikely to be the manufacturing model of software manufacturers in the past. This idea and restriction were difficult for software companies at that time, so most companies were reluctant to use and join free software (even though it was powerful, they still had some concerns). In terms of free software, many free software developers all over the world did not hate commercial software as Stallman did (after all, this is the livelihood of many developers). Therefore, some people began to seek a more moderate concept.
1997, Eric Steven Raymond, an American computer hacker, first put forward the concept of "OSS" in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and described and discussed it with a series of papers.
Raymond does not emphasize calling free software to completely replace the existing commercial software, but emphasizes this new development mode-open source development mode. Through the great development ability of free software, especially Linux, everyone can participate in it because it can quickly improve the quality of the program itself.
Raymond's paper quickly got the response of some big companies: when Netscape executives read Cathedral and Market, they were very inspired and announced that their Netscape browser (the predecessor of Mozilla project, and now the famous Firefox browser is a member of Mozilla project) was open source on June 5438+0998 65438+ 10.
1In February 1998, Raymond established the Open Source Promotion Association (website: http://www.opensource.org) to provide the definition and certification of Oss.
1In August, 998, Microsoft realized that it had to deal with the impact of the Oss movement, so that its engineers wrote a famous Halloween document. Then the document was leaked and made public. This document describes Microsoft's despicable means and sinister intentions to deal with open source programs such as Linux, and the whole world is in an uproar.
1999, Sun, HP, IBM, SAP and other companies announced that they would start using or selling Linux, and large companies began to join the Oss movement. At this time, the open source software movement really began to rise. Oss movement can be said to be a branch of free software movement, but the difference between them is not obvious. Generally speaking, the free software movement is more of an idealistic movement based on political and philosophical thoughts (sometimes called the so-called hacker culture). Oss movement is another explanation of free software movement, which makes free software gentler and more acceptable to people.
In fact, Oss can be said to explain the advantages of free software to some commercial companies in disguise, so that they can eliminate their worries, look at free software from a new perspective and use it in a new way; Oss has indeed given many commercial companies the opportunity to take advantage of the advantages of free software and change to another business model. Many companies see some different worlds from open source code, and they start to open their own products or protocols, because it can really bring them more benefits. At the same time, the participation of commercial companies strengthened the momentum of Oss movement and accelerated the snowball rolling speed of Oss movement, which began to roll bigger and bigger, and it became more and more difficult to stop.
In 2004, Netscape's browser finally made a comeback with the help of open source. Firefox successfully released the 1.0 version, and with its superior security performance, it began to regain the market share of Microsoft IE in the browser market.
Storman doesn't like the word Oss. He believes that the concept of Oss has impacted free software, giving many manufacturers the opportunity to abuse it, which goes against the original spirit of free software. In his philosophy, he thinks this is wrong. For this reason, supporters of free software and Oss argue with each other. I don't think we need to pay too much attention to these arguments. Time will tell (we should be a doer like Linus, not a boring theorist). After all, today's Oss can be said to sum up all the advantages of free software, so now, we only discuss Oss.