OSS for companies: Brief history of the open source phenomenon

I-3 Brief history of the open source phenomenon

When computer age began the computer science was one of the sciences in which researchers shared freely the source code of their programs.

In the early 80ies this tacit rule of knowledge sharing changed.Editors began to sell their first software without distributing the source code: "Proprietary software" for example any commercial software such as Microsoft Windows.

So before the 80ies everything was Open Source.The open source phenomenon that we are hearing everyday has nothing of a new topic or a revolution.

Open Source as we said before was the beginning of the computer software.

Open Source is before all a way of thinking, a philosophy as we are going to discover it.People which are making open source software believe that everybody has something to win by making that kind of solutions.

The copyleft is a good logo of this state of mind:

It clearly shows his opposition to the copyright.

Copyleft:a legal instrument that requires those who pass on a program to include the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the code; the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.