An attempt to put the history of FOSS in the context of the broader sweep of history.
Moveable type printing press
church and state monopoly served censorship
Stationer's Guild in UK had monopoly. Expired.
Statute of Anne was first copyright law. UK. 1710
Article I, Section 8, clause 8 gives Congress power to create copyright, patents.
A great many foundational ideas for computing were worked, out, just for some examples by no means exhaustive:
German mathematician David Hilbert (1900) at the turn of the century set the stage for Church-Turing.
Copyright grew to encompass new things:
player piano rolls, sheet music, recorded sound, photographs, moving pictures
pre WWII
Church, Turing, Shannon et al,
The roots of an explicit information theory and computer science were pretty much laid down prior to WWII, with a long tail back into the history of mathematics.
Military need drove developments in cryptology, cryptography, cryptanalysis, logistics, ballistics, eg, Manhattan project, Bletchley Park Bombe and Colossus.
The Manhattan project was a notable user of services by people referred to as computers.
post WWII
EDVAC & von Neumanns at IAS, rise of electronic, stored-instruction, digital computing
printers and computers used to be people
AT&T monopoly, consent decree restricting it from computing business
Multics --> Spacewar+PDB --> C+Unix --> Berkeley
Honeywell vs. Sperry-Univac case breaks fundamental computing patents.
deregulatory spirit, eg
- airlines
- homebrewing
Forgot to mention 1970s birth (MITS ALTAIR, MS BASIC) and rise (IBM, Apple, TRS-80, TI-99/A, Timex/Sinclair, etc) of the personal computer using integrated circuit microprocessors.
- copyright comes to software,
- university tech transfer offices (Dole-Bayh Act)
- business formed from University efforts, NDAs
- break-up of original AT&T: It could sell Unix licenses
- IBM PC
- Macintosh
Told story of Stallman and the printer jam alert system vs. the driver under NDA.
Companies cannibalized the MIT AI lab: Symbolics, Lisp Machines
Foundation of the GNU project, then the FSF, that takes us to 1985.
Goal was a complete, free OS. One huge success was gcc (cf Tanenbaum and the Free University Compiler Kit, Cygnus). Made many applications and utilities, never quite got their kernel, The Hurd, to work well enough fast enough to be so widely adopted as other kernels.
At RIT: Checkout out the CAST building's McGraw displays (MCI); Wallace 2nd floor, printing presses.
Unix --> BSDs (Free, Open, Net, Dragonfly, MacOS via NeXT) (free and open source before those terms were coined for software)
BSDi, 386BSD
Jolitzes, Bill Joy
Proprietary Unix versions: SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, Ultrix, Xenix
1991 Torvalds, U. Helsinki grad student, PC, MINIX & Tannenbaum, dial-up timeshare mainframe.
Puts it on Usenet (store-and-forward, "news", groups, subscribe, tracked what was read) and FTP (pre HTTP file transfer, see also gopher)
Linux kernel + GNU utilities --> a useful system
grew alongside the BSDs
Tim Berners-Lee @ CERN, WWW, http, browsers
Marc Andreessen @ NCSA UIUC, Mosaic, <img> tag
what is Mozilla short for?
Netscape
Microsoft IE and bundling
browser wars
antitrust suit
Sun, Oracle et al
StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, The Document Foundation
Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act
Rise of home dial-up
AOL
9/11
Afghanistan, Iraq, DHS, Room 641A
2008 financial crash
flash crash
rapid rise of cell phone use, SMS
Google web apps, Gmail 2004-2009, Google Maps, etc
eg, cloud+mobile
Firefox, Chrome
start of Facebook, Twitter, et al
Snowden revelations 2013
VW scandal 2015
social media use rises to near-ubiquity
2016 election and use of social media
media chaos: advertising flees, newspapers & other news implode filesharing: Napster & lawsuits, contributory infringement iTunes, music, audio books, video streaming