The Future of Open Source :: essays research papers

A placement without a display, for example, could discourage the development ofgraphical applications, or if it were herculean for several people to interact with the alike application this could discourage some educational uses. Moreover, Fano nonedthat after a system starts to develop in a particular room, work in this directionis preferred and it accelerates the development in this direction. As a result, theinherent characteristics of a time-sharing system may well have long-lastingeffects on the character, composition, and skilful life of a community (cf.Tuomi, 2002 86).The modern concept of proprietary software emerged in the 1970s, when the information processing system-equipment industry began to unbundle software from hardware, and independentsoftware firms started to produce software for industry-standard computer platforms.Over the decade, this development led to the realization that software was associatedwith measurable intellectual capital which could provide it s owners with revenuestreams. In 1983, AT&T was freed from the constraints of its earlier just agreement,which had restricted its ability to commercialize software, and it started toenforce its copyrights in the popular Unix operating system. The growing restrictionson access to source code also started to make it difficult to integrate peripheral equipment,such as printers, into the developed systems. This frustrated many softwaredevelopers, and led Richard Stallman to launch the GNU project in 1983 and the Free package Foundation in 1985. Stallmans pioneering idea was to use copyrights in away that guaranteed that the source code would remain available for further developmentand that it could not be captured by commercial interests. For that purpose,Stallman produced a standard license, the GNU General Public License, or GPL, and setup to develop an alternative operating system that would eventually be able to replaceproprietary operating systems.Although the GNU Alix/Hurd operat ing-system kernel never really materialized, theGNU project became a critical intromission for the open-source movement. The toolsdeveloped in the GNU project, including the GNU C-language compiler GCC, the C-languageruntime libraries, and the extendable Emacs program editor, paved the way forthe launching of other open-source projects. The most important of these became theLinux project, partly because it was the last critical piece missing from the full GNUoperating-system environment. Eventually, the core Linux operating system became431The Future of Open Sourcecombined with a large set of open-source tools and applications, many of which reliedon the GNU program libraries and used the GPL.The first version of the Linux operating system was released on the Internet inmid-September 1991. The amount of code in the first Linux release was quite modest.