Open Source History of the OSI The prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture. The "open source" label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John "maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond. We were reacting to Netscape's announcement that it planned to give away the source of its browser. One of us (Raymond) had been invited out by Netscape to help them plan the release and followon actions. We realized that the Netscape announcement had created a precious window of time within which we might finally be able to get the corporate world to listen to what we have to teach about the superiority of an open development process. We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with. Over the next week we worked on spreading the word. Linus Torvalds gave us an all-important imprimatur :-) the following day. Bruce Perens got involved early, offering to trademark "open source" and host this web site. Phil Hughes offered us a pulpit in Linux Journal. Richard Stallman flirted with adopting the term, then changed his mind. The Open Source Definition is derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Bruce Perens composed the original draft; it was refined using suggestions of the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution developers in e-mail conference during most of June, 1997. They then voted to approve it as Debian's publicly stated policy. It was revised somewhat and Debian-specific references were removed at the origination of the Open Source Initiative in February 1998. The Open Source Initiative is now a California public benefit (not-for-profit) corporation whose official address (to which you should feel free to send tax-deductible contributions) is: Law Offices of Lawrence E. Rosen 702 Marshall St. Ste. 301 Redwood City, CA 94063 OSI is comprised of the board members who make up its directorship. OSI is not a membership organization. Our web site is hosted by Brian Behlendorf, a former board member. Our email is hosted by Russell Nelson, a current board member. This story is continuing ... 22 Jan 1998: Netscape announces it will release the source code for Navigator. 3 Feb 1998: Palo Alto brainstorming session coins the term "open source." During the following week, Bruce Perens and ESR launch www.opensource.org. Early February: Spirited debate within the hacker community: "open source" vs. "free software". This terminological debate is understood by all parties to be a proxy for wider issues about the community's relationship to the business world. Meanwhile, the term begins to show up in trade-press articles relating to Linux and the upcoming Netscape release. 23 Feb 1998: Netscape's February 23 press release referred to "open source", and the same day O'Reilly associates agreed to use the term in their press releases and on their web page. 31 Mar 1998: Navigator source is released. Within hours, fixes and enhancements begin pouring in off the net. 7 Apr 1998: Tim O'Reilly's "Freeware Summit Conference" brings together 18 of the movement's leaders. The term "open source" and accompanying economics- and self-interest-based arguments are endorsed by a vote. 14 April 1998: Salon magazine interviews ESR on open source. The message is starting to get out to the mainstream (non-technical) press. April 1998: References to "open source" begin to fly thick and fast in the trade press, with positive spin (see the graph below). Within the hacker community itself the terminological (and underlying ideological) debate winds down, with "open source" emerging as a clear majority choice. Use of the term "free software" begins a reciprocal decline. 7 May 1998: Corel Computer Corporation announces the Netwinder, an inexpensive network computer that uses Linux as its production OS. This is the first major, conscious adoption of the widget frosting model by an established business. 11 May 1998: Corel, parent company of Corel Computer Corporation and publisher of Word Perfect, announces plans to port WordPerfect and its other office software to Linux. 28 May 1998: Sun Microsystems and Adaptec join Linux International – the first two large established OS and hardware vendors to do so. 22 Jun 1998: IBM announces that it will sell and support Apache as part of its WebSphere suite. The trade press hails this as a breakthrough for open-source software. 10 July 1998: The Economist takes editorial notice of Linux, reporting Datapro's positive findings. The message is beginning to get out in the financial press. 13 July 1998: Computerworld, perhaps the most influential of today's MIS magazines, publishes an interview with ESR on open source. 17 July 1998: Oracle and Informix announce that they will port their databases to Linux. (This follows similar, lower-profile announcements from Computer Associates and Interbase.) August 1998: The Forbes magazine issue with this date (actually out in late July) featured a major article on open source, with Linus Torvalds on the cover. The truly big-time capitalists are beginning to wake up! 10 Aug 1998: Sun Microsystems, clearly feeling the pressure from open source, makes Solaris available under a free license to individual users, also to educational/non-profit/research institutions. 11 Aug 1998: Revision 1.0 of the VinodV memorandum on open source (annotated here as the Halloween Document), is circulated inside Microsoft. 24 Aug 1998: SCO joins Linux International and reveals that it is making UnixWare 7 Linux-binary-compatible. This means a proprietary Unix vendor has judged the leading open-source OS a significant source of native applications! 26 Aug 1998: Steve Ballmer, new president of Microsoft, admits "Sure, we're worried." about Apache and Linux – and says Microsoft is considering disclosing more Windows source. 29 September 1998: Red Hat announces that Intel and Netscape have acquired a minority stake in the leading Linux distributor. Wall Street notices. Much speculation that not all is well between Intel and Microsoft ensues. 14 October 1998: Microsoft issues a statement adducing Linux's existence as evidence that Microsoft does not in fact have an OS monopoly. 1 November 1998: Publication of the Halloween Documents, documenting Microsoft's plans for dirty tricks against Linux and other open-source projects, ignites a week-long furore in the national media. 9 November 1998: The Jay Jacobs clothing chain moves its point-of-sale systems to Linux and announces the fact in a marketing first. 16 December 1998: IDG announces that Linux market share increased 212% in 1998. 27 January 1999: HP and SGI announce Linux support on their machines the same day, ratifying a trend begun earlier by Sun (shipping Linux on UltraSparcs). The days of proprietary Unix begin to look numbered. 17 February 1999: IBM announces Linux support on its hardware, a Lotus port for Linux, and a partnership with Red Hat. 1-5 March 1999: The first LinuxWorld is Linux's (and Open Source's) first real trade show. Major announcements by HP, IBM, SAP and others signal the beginning of serious corporate support. 15 March 1999: Apple release Darwin (the core software of MacOSX) under an open-source license (a technical flaw in the license is later rectified). 19 March 1999: HP announces it has 24/7 Linux support for sale. 4 Jun 1999: Microsoft claims Linux is outselling Windows 98 at major software retail outlets. 9 Jul 1999: Amiga announces that Linux will be the core of the next-generation Amiga Operating Environment. Eric Rauch has done Lexis-Nexis searches to track the number of references to "open source" (coupled with "netscape", "software", or "linux" to avoid false hits) in American newspapers and magazines. You can see his plot, which shows a steady rise from zero in January 1998 (with a spike in April doubtless due to the April 1 Netscape release). (Unfortunately, Lexis/Nexis rearranged its libraries in August 1999, so later figures won't be comparable to those above.) 2.1. History of Unix, Linux, and Open Source / Free Software 2.1.1. Unix In 1969-1970, Kenneth Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others at AT&T Bell Labs began developing a small operating system on a little-used PDP-7. The operating system was soon christened Unix, a pun on an earlier operating system project called MULTICS. In 1972-1973 the system was rewritten in the programming language C, an unusual step that was visionary: due to this decision, Unix was the first widely-used operating system that could switch from and outlive its original hardware. Other innovations were added to Unix as well, in part due to synergies between Bell Labs and the academic community. In 1979, the ``seventh edition'' (V7) version of Unix was released, the grandfather of all extant Unix systems. After this point, the history of Unix becomes somewhat convoluted. The academic community, led by Berkeley, developed a variant called the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), while AT&T continued developing Unix under the names ``System III'' and later ``System V''. In the late 1980's through early 1990's the ``wars'' between these two major strains raged. After many years each variant adopted many of the key features of the other. Commercially, System V won the ``standards wars'' (getting most of its interfaces into the formal standards), and most hardware vendors switched to AT&T's System V. However, System V ended up incorporating many BSD innovations, so the resulting system was more a merger of the two branches. The BSD branch did not die, but instead became widely used for research, for PC hardware, and for single-purpose servers (e.g., many web sites use a BSD derivative). The result was many different versions of Unix, all based on the original seventh edition. Most versions of Unix were proprietary and maintained by their respective hardware vendor, for example, Sun Solaris is a variant of System V. Three versions of the BSD branch of Unix ended up as open source: FreeBSD (concentrating on ease-of-installation for PC-type hardware), NetBSD (concentrating on many different CPU architectures), and a variant of NetBSD, OpenBSD (concentrating on security). More general information about Unix history can be found at http://www.datametrics.com/tech/unix/uxhistry/brf-hist.htm and http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/unix. Much more information about the BSD history can be found in [McKusick 1999] and ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree. Those interested in reading an advocacy piece that presents arguments for using Unix-like systems should see http://www.unix-vs-nt.org. 2.1.2. Free Software Foundation In 1984 Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation (FSF) began the GNU project, a project to create a free version of the Unix operating system. By free, Stallman meant software that could be freely used, read, modified, and redistributed. The FSF successfully built a vast number of useful components, including a C compiler (gcc), an impressive text editor (emacs), and a host of fundamental tools. However, in the 1990's the FSF was having trouble developing the operating system kernel [FSF 1998]; without a kernel the rest of their software would not work. 2.1.3. Linux In 1991 Linus Torvalds began developing an operating system kernel, which he named ``Linux'' [Torvalds 1999]. This kernel could be combined with the FSF material and other components (in particular some of the BSD components and MIT's X-windows software) to produce a freely-modifiable and very useful operating system. This book will term the kernel itself the ``Linux kernel'' and an entire combination as ``Linux''. Note that many use the term ``GNU/Linux'' instead for this combination. In the Linux community, different organizations have combined the available components differently. Each combination is called a ``distribution'', and the organizations that develop distributions are called ``distributors''. Common distributions include Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera, Corel, and Debian. There are differences between the various distributions, but all distributions are based on the same foundation: the Linux kernel and the GNU glibc libraries. Since both are covered by ``copyleft'' style licenses, changes to these foundations generally must be made available to all, a unifying force between the Linux distributions at their foundation that does not exist between the BSD and AT&T-derived Unix systems. This book is not specific to any Linux distribution; when it discusses Linux it presumes Linux kernel version 2.2 or greater and the C library glibc 2.1 or greater, valid assumptions for essentially all current major Linux distributions. 2.1.4. Open Source / Free Software Increased interest in software that is freely shared has made it increasingly necessary to define and explain it. A widely used term is ``open source software'', which is further defined in [OSI 1999]. Eric Raymond [1997, 1998] wrote several seminal articles examining its various development processes. Another widely-used term is ``free software'', where the ``free'' is short for ``freedom'': the usual explanation is ``free speech, not free beer.'' Neither phrase is perfect. The term ``free software'' is often confused with programs whose executables are given away at no charge, but whose source code cannot be viewed, modified, or redistributed. Conversely, the term ``open source'' is sometime (ab)used to mean software whose source code is visible, but for which there are limitations on use, modification, or redistribution. This book uses the term ``open source'' for its usual meaning, that is, software which has its source code freely available for use, viewing, modification, and redistribution; a more detailed definition is contained in the Open Source Definition. In some cases, a difference in motive is suggested; those preferring the term ``free software'' wish to strongly emphasize the need for freedom, while those using the term may have other motives (e.g., higher reliability) or simply wish to appear less strident. For information on this definition of free software, and the motivations behind it, can be found at http://www.fsf.org. Those interested in reading advocacy pieces for open source software and free software should see http://www.opensource.org and http://www.fsf.org. There are other documents which examine such software, for example, Miller [1995] found that the open source software were noticeably more reliable than proprietary software (using their measurement technique, which measured resistance to crashing due to random input). 2.1.5. Comparing Linux and Unix This book uses the term ``Unix-like'' to describe systems intentionally like Unix. In particular, the term ``Unix-like'' includes all major Unix variants and Linux distributions. Note that many people simply use the term ``Unix'' to describe these systems instead. Originally, the term ``Unix'' meant a particular product developed by AT&T. Today, the Open Group owns the Unix trademark, and it defines Unix as ``the worldwide Single UNIX Specification''. Linux is not derived from Unix source code, but its interfaces are intentionally like Unix. Therefore, Unix lessons learned generally apply to both, including information on security. Most of the information in this book applies to any Unix-like system. Linux-specific information has been intentionally added to enable those using Linux to take advantage of Linux's capabilities. Unix-like systems share a number of security mechanisms, though there are subtle differences and not all systems have all mechanisms available. All include user and group ids (uids and gids) for each process and a filesystem with read, write, and execute permissions (for user, group, and other). See Thompson [1974] and Bach [1986] for general information on Unix systems, including their basic security mechanisms. Chapter 3 summarizes key security features of Unix and Linux.

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