The Future of Open Source :: essays research papers

A dodge without a display, for example, could discourage the ripening ofgraphical applications, or if it were severe for several people to interact with thesame application this could discourage near educational uses. Moreover, Fano notedthat after a system starts to develop in a particular direction, work in this directionis preferred and it accelerates the development in this direction. As a result, theinherent characteristics of a time-sharing system whitethorn well have long-lastingeffects on the character, composition, and mind sprightliness of a community (cf.Tuomi, 2002 86).The modern concept of proprietary software emerged in the 1970s, when the electronic computer-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 important intellectual capital which could provide its owners with revenuestreams. In 1983, AT&T was freed from the constraints of its earlier antitrust 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 inscribe 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 FreeSoftware Foundation in 1985. Stallmans pioneering idea was to use copyrights in away that guaranteed that the source label 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 at last be able to replaceproprietary operating systems.Although the GNU Alix/Hurd op erating-system burden never really materialized, theGNU project became a critical footing for the open-source movement. The toolsdeveloped in the GNU project, including the GNU C-language compiler GCC, the C-languageruntime libraries, and the extendible Emacs program editor, paved the way forthe launching of other open-source projects. The some important of these became theLinux project, partly because it was the last critical piece missing from the estimable GNUoperating-system environment. Eventually, the core Linux operating system became431The Future of Open tooth rootcombined with a large set of open-source tools and applications, many of which reliedon the GNU program libraries and used the GPL.The archetypal 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.