Back in the early 1980s, some programmers were getting concerned about the way that ever-more-restrictive licensing arrangements meant that they couldn't fix broken software or make improvements. One such enthusiast was Richard Stallman, who is credited with coming up with many of the ideas that underpin what's now widely known as open source software.
Stallman and his fellow supporters of free software argued that an increasing number of restrictions were taking control of computer tools out of the hands of the user, and making it harder for programmers to innovate.
Fast forward 20 years and an issue that only stirred the wrath of a hardcore group of techies seems to be becoming increasingly important to a wider audience. This month saw BlackBerry maker RIM shell out over $600m over a software patent litigation case. The company's entire US service was put at risk by an issue that previously would have been of very little interest to most of RIM's customers: ownership of the idea behind a software application.
At the height of the case, many of RIM's customers were probably be asking themselves, how did this happen and isn't there a way to avoid it? The issue of ownership of software has become something that has the potential to impact people's lives in a very real way.
Nowadays, these kinds of problems are confronting not just programmers, but society as a whole, according to long-time open source advocate Bruce Perens. "What in 1980 was only important to someone like me is now something important to all computer users, because computers have become such an important part of most people's lives," he says.
Issues that have only recently begun to surface in the public consciousness, in high-profile events like the NTP-RIM lawsuit and the furore over Sony BMG's insidious music CDs, are exactly the sort of thing Stallman had in mind when he created the Free Software Foundation in 1985, says Perens: "We are seeing what he feared 20 years ago come true around us today."
The end result is that a lot of people who didn't think free software's politics were particularly important or relevant to them are now starting to take an interest.
Back to the 1980s
Discussions of the origins of open source are more contentious than a theological tract, but Stallman is usually credited with being the first to crystallise the ideas underlying what's generally known as open source. Stallman had been a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and there he had witnessed what he saw as the decline of the ideal of scientific collaboration amongst programmers. Part of the problem was that around that time software makers stopped distributing source code along with their products; in one incident that infuriated Stallman, he found he couldn't fix malfunctioning printer software because he didn't have access to the source.
Stallman saw the issue as one of freedom — that users should have the ability to run the program for any use, to modify it, copy it and release modified versions to the public. Moreover, in Stallman's view, it was just as important to protect the freedoms of others, meaning the modified versions should be released under the same conditions — a concept called copyleft. The concept was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License in 1985, and in 1989 in the GNU General Public License (generally know as the GPL), now the most widely used free/open source licence.
"Richard was every bit as interested in collaboration as anyone who identifies with open source — he just thought of it in terms of having...
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