Grew out of the related, but separate, “free software” movement
In 1983, Richard Stallman - 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).
He called this alternative - GNU (GNU’s Not Unix)
He released his code under the GNU Public License (GPL) - which also allowed companies to sell software based on GNU
GNU lacked a finished kernel at the time. So, many GNU users combined GNU and Linux into a functional operating system. These bundles became known as GNU/Linux distributions.
Clash of ideals - Birth of “Open Source”
Tensions grew between people 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. The group settled on the label “open source” - coined by Christine Peterson - to distinguish its aims