The open source software movement grew out of the related, but separate, “free software” movement. In 1983, Richard Stallman, at the time a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said he would create a free alternative to the Unix operating system, then owned by AT&T; Stallman dubbed his alternative GNU, a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix.” (View Highlight)
For Stallman, the idea of “free” software was about more than giving software away. It was about ensuring that users were free to use software as they saw fit, free to study its source code, free to modify it for their own purposes, and free to share it with others. Stallman released his code under a license known as the GNU Public License, or GPL, which guarantees users those four software freedoms. The GPL is a “viral” license, meaning that anyone who creates software based on code licensed under the GPL must also release that derivative code under a GPL license. (View Highlight)
Importantly, the license doesn’t forbid companies from selling copies of GNU software. As long as you allow your customers to share your code, you can charge as much as you want for your software. The phrase “free as in free speech, not free as in free beer” is often used to help explain this apparent contradiction. (View Highlight)
Other programmers soon followed Stallman’s example. One of the most important was Linus Torvalds, the vitriolic Finnish programmer who created the Linux operating system in 1991. Linux is a “kernel,” the core of an operating system that talks to the hardware and translates the basic input from your keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen into something the software can understand. GNU lacked a finished kernel at the time, so many GNU users combined GNU and Linux into a functional operating system. Bundles of the GNU operating system, Linux kernel, and other tools became known as GNU/Linux distributions; some purists still refer to Linux-based operating systems as “GNU/Linux.” Soon, companies like Red Hat were making money selling support for open source technologies like Linux. (View Highlight)
In time, tensions grew between those, like Stallman, who believed that all software should be free on ethical grounds, and more business-oriented developers who thought that freely sharing code was a better way to build software but not an ethical imperative. In 1998, a group met to discuss how to promote the idea of shared code and open collaboration. Worried that the term “free software” and Stallman’s more absolutist philosophy would make their ideas less palatable to businesses that wanted to keep some of their code proprietary, the group settled on the label “open source,” coined by Christine Peterson, to distinguish its aims. (View Highlight)
For example, in 2014, security researchers revealed serious vulnerabilities in two crucial open source projects: OpenSSL and Bash, which are part of many major operating systems. No software is free of potential security problems, but the fact that these issues went undetected for so long highlighted a big problem for open source: Many big-name open source projects rely on lesser-known open source components run by volunteers who have little time to fix problems and no money to hire security auditors. (View Highlight)
Some companies that have built businesses around open source products are adopting controversial new licensing schemes. In an effort to keep cloud computing services from selling competing services based on its code, MongoDB created a new license in 2018 that restricts how other companies can use its MongoDB Community Server. Other open source companies have adopted the Fair Source license, which requires companies with more than 15 employees to pay a fee to use software that uses the license, or the newer Commons Clause, which restricts how companies can commercialize the software. You can still view the source code from software released under these licenses, but they break with the free and open source software tradition of allowing users to do whatever they want with the code. (View Highlight)
Startups, meanwhile, are working on novel ways to turn a profit on open source. Red Hat makes money by selling support for its open source products, but that’s not feasible for every open source project. A company called Tidelift aims to sell support through a single subscription fee for a package of open source projects. Think of it as “Netflix for open source.” (View Highlight)
Solving these funding problems is crucial to the future of open source. But money isn’t the only problem. The open source workforce is even less diverse than the tech industry as a whole, according to a survey conducted in 2017 by GitHub. Half of the respondents had witnessed bad behavior—such as rudeness, name calling, or harassment—and said it was enough to keep them away from a particular project or community. Around 18 percent of survey respondents had experienced such bad behavior firsthand. That’s a problem because working on open source projects is now an important part of landing a job in technology. If women and minorities are shut out of open source, then the technology industry as a whole becomes that much less diverse. (View Highlight)
