Essay About Gnu Project And Richard Stallman

The Future Of Open Source
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A system without a display, for example, could discourage the development of
graphical applications, or if it were difficult for several people to interact with the
same application this could discourage some educational uses. Moreover, Fano noted
that after a system starts to develop in a particular direction, work in this direction
is preferred and it accelerates the development in this direction. As a result, “the
inherent characteristics of a time-sharing system may well have long-lasting
effects on the character, composition, and intellectual life of a community” (cf.
Tuomi, 2002: 86).
The modern concept of proprietary software emerged in the 1970s, when the computer-
equipment industry began to unbundle software from hardware, and independent
software firms started to produce software for industry-standard computer platforms.
Over the decade, this development led to the realization that software was associated
with important intellectual capital which could provide its owners with revenue
streams. 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 to
enforce its copyrights in the popular Unix operating system. The growing restrictions
on access to source code also started to make it difficult to integrate peripheral equipment,
such as printers, into the developed systems. This frustrated many software
developers, and led Richard Stallman to launch the GNU project in 1983 and the Free
Software Foundation in 1985. Stallmans pioneering idea was to use copyrights in a
way that guaranteed that the source code would remain available for further development
and 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 set
up to develop an alternative operating system that would eventually be able to replace
proprietary operating systems.
Although the GNU Alix/Hurd operating-system kernel never really materialized, the
GNU project became a critical foundation for the open-source movement. The tools
developed in the GNU project, including the GNU C-language compiler GCC, the C-language
runtime libraries, and the extendable Emacs program editor, paved the way for
the launching of other open-source projects. The most important of these became the
Linux project, partly because it was the last critical piece missing from the full GNU
operating-system environment. Eventually, the core Linux operating system became
The Future of Open Source
combined with a large set of open-source tools and applications, many of which relied
on the GNU program libraries and used the GPL.
The first version of the Linux operating system was released on the Internet in
mid-September 1991. The amount of code in the first Linux release was quite modest.
The smallest file consisted of a single line and the longest was 678 lines, or 612
lines without comments. The average size of the files in the first Linux package was
37 lines without comments. In total, the system consisted of 88 files, with 231 kilobytes
of code and comments. The program was written in the C programming language,
which the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, had started to study in 1990
(Tuomi, 2004).
During the 1990s, the Linux operating system kernel grew at a rapid pace. The overall
growth of the system can be seen in Figure 1. The accumulated number of key contributors
recorded in the Credits file of the Linux system increased from 80 in March
1994, when they were first recorded, to 418 in July 2002, and 450 by the end of 2003.
The developers were widely distributed geographically from the beginning of the
project. In July 2002, there were 28 countries with ten or fewer developers and seven
countries with more than ten developers. At the end of 2003, the Credits file recorded
contributors from 35 countries (Tuomi, 2004).
Ilkka Tuomi
Figure 1 – Growth of Linux kernel, 1991-2000 (source: Tuomi, 2001).
Linux has become a particularly visible example of open-source software, as it has
often been perceived as a challenger to Microsofts dominance in personal-computer
operating systems. Other important open-source projects, such as Apache, Perl,
MySQL, PHP, Sendmail and BitTorrent, have also considerably shaped the modern computing
landscape. In fact, the global Internet now operates to a large extent on opensource
software. Commercial concerns, such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SAP,
Motorola and Intel, have become important players in the open-source field. Policymakers
from South America to Europe, China, Republic of