History of free software

An Open source boom is happening around the world.And how many of u are aware of the history of Open Source. Let's see brief history of Open Source Softwares.

It's been said that in the beginning, there was only free software.Later on, proprietary software was born, and it quickly dominated the software landscape.. Only recently has the software industry considered free software as an option again.

In 1983,Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. The ultimate goal of the GNU Project was to build a free operating system.The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL in 1989) written by Richard Stallman,was designed to ensure that the software produced by GNU will remain free and to promote the production of more and more free software.

The Linux kernel, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. The license wasn't exactly a free software license, but with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License. The combination of the almost-finished GNU operating system and the Linux kernel made the first complete free software operating system.

From 1993 onwards, operating systems based on GNU, Linux, and other software began to appear. Peter MacDonald 's Softlanding Linux System was the first organised distribution, and Debian GNU/Linux was probably the first popular distribution.

In 1997, the Debian project published their Debian Free Software Guidelines.

During the 1990s, many open source projects have produced a good quantity of useful software. Some of them are Apache (widely used as a WWW server), Perl (an interpreted language with lots of libraries), XFree86 (the most widely used X11 implementation for PC-based machines), GNOME and KDE (both providing a consistent set of libraries and applications to present the casual user with an easy to use and friendly desktop environment), Mozilla (the free software project funded by Netscape to build a WWW browser), etc.

In August 1999, Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice office suite as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The free software version was renamed OpenOffice.org, and coexists with StarOffice.

In May 8, 2007, Sun Microsystems released the Java Development Kit as OpenJDK under the GNU General Public License. Part of the class library (4% of it) could not be released as open source due to them being licensed from other parties and were included as binary plugs. Because of this, in June 2007, RedHat launched IcedTea to resolve the encumbered components with the equivalents from GNU Classpath implementation.