A short history of GNU and Free Open Source Software. Past, Present and Future.

1. PAST, PRESENT &
FUTURE
Atif Hussain

2. PAST

3. History of FLOSS – Part 1
 1960s to 70s – Software sharing culture in US labs
(Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT)
 1976 – Bill Gates' “Open Letter to Hobbyists”
advocating that software should be paid for, including
royalties
 Early 80s – LISP programming language was taken
by MIT, to the dismay of hackers.
 1983 – Richard Stallman quit job at MIT. Started to
worked on GNU, a set of programming tools.
 1986 – Free Software Foundation was born. To
promote 'free software' and the GNU project.
 1990 – Bringing 'free software' to the corporate world
with Cygnus.

4. History of FLOSS – Part 2
 1991 – Linus Torvalds distributed a Unix-like kernel
and encouraged everyone to help improve it. The
kernel was later named “Linux” and then integrated
with GNU into an operating system called
“GNU/Linux”.
 1992 – Xfree86 was born, the start of bringing
GNU/Linux to the desktop level.
 1993 – Debian and Slackware as implementations of
GNU/Linux were born.
 1994 – Apache, the now popular web server system,
was born.
 1995 – Red Hat was born.

5. History of FLOSS – Part 3
 1996 – KDE as desktop environment was born.
 1997 – GNU/Linux grabbed the 25% share of the server
market and grew at 25% per year.
 1997 – GNOME desktop manager was born.
 1998 – Netscape released Netscape Navigator code base
under open source. This paved the way for development of
Mozilla Firefox.
 1998 – The term 'open source' was coined. Led to the
formation of Open Source Initiative and formulation of open
source definition.
 1999 – Red Hat was transformed into a corporation. Other
corporations were established around “selling” Linux: not
charging for the software but for the support services.

6. PRESENT

7. South America
 In 2005 the Government of Peru voted to adopt
open source across all its bodies. In the preamble
to the bill, the Peruvian government stressed that
the choice was made to ensure that key pillars
of democracy were safeguarded: "The basic
principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the
basic guarantees of a state of law."
 In December 2004, law in Venezuela (Decree 3390)
went into effect, mandating a two year transition to
open source in all public agencies. As of June 2009
this ambitious transition is still under way.
 In February 2008, the Dominican Republic passed a
law to facilitate the migration of all public entities
(government, education, etc.) to Software Libre, and
to adopt open standards in the public sector.

8. Europe
 In Germany's federal
state Thuringia the Ministry for culture and
education has launched a project called "Linux
für Schulen" (Linux for schools) which is
intended to further the influences of Open
Source software in public education.
 Munich city civil service in Germany, 2003
started migrating to free software.

9. Asia
 The Government of India has set up a resource centre
for Free and Open Source Software managed jointly by
C-DAC Chennai and Anna University, Chennai. It has
one of its node in Mumbai at VJTI College.
 A couple of hundred thousand copies of GNU/Linux
have been distributed across India, through local
popular computer magazines, at a price of just around
$2. That includes both the cost of a slick magazine and
CD. This software can, of course, be legally copied
across as many computers as needed.
 Pakistan Ministry of Science and Technology advisor
Salman Ansari says that some 50,000 low cost
computers are to be installed in schools and colleges all
over Pakistan. These will be PII computers, each being
sourced for less than $100 a piece, he says.

10. Far East
 Vietnam - the Ministry of Information and
Communications has issued an instruction on
using open source software at state agencies.
 "Malaysian Public Sector Open Source
Software Program" launched in 2004 saved
millions on proprietary software licences till
2008.
 A recent report at OpenSource.org has
brought up an interesting fact. The Malaysian
government is using 97% open source
software.

11. FUTURE

12. Sam Ramji, Senior Director, Microsoft
 "We’ve made so much progress in terms of
opening the channels of dialogue between the
OS community, partners, vendors, and
customers. Dissonance won’t help anyone
progress and innovate. One of biggest
misconceptions that we continue to battle is
that we compete with open source. Microsoft
does not compete with open source."

13. Dave Rosenberg, CEO, Mulesource
 "I see the current tech climate as ripe with
opportunity for open source. With the murky
U.S. economy, companies are much less
interested in spending huge amounts of their
budgets on up-front license fees to proprietary
vendors. IT shops are more interested than
ever in controlling their fate -- and controlling
their destiny. "

14. Robert Sutor, Vice president, IBM
 "The new challenges and pressures will arise
because of business issues, and not
technology, in my opinion. We have many,
many excellent developers in the open source
communities. We need to have many, many
more excellent 'big picture' leaders emerging
from and for those communities."

15. Zack Urlocker, Vice president, MySQL
 "Young folks starting their careers in IT are
already experts in open source; they've been
using it for most of their college life. For
managers and older developers, I think these
are important skills to have. Just like you
couldn't get ahead in the late 1990s without
Web development experience, I think we're
going to see the same trend around open
source. These will be the necessary technical
skills for career development."

16. Jim Zemlin, Director, Linux Foundation
 Looking to the end of the 2010's, Zemlin draws
on the famous vision of Microsoft co-founder
Bill Gates for a computer on every desktop
and every home that drove that last revolution.
 "My vision," Zemlin said, "is to have a
computer in every gas pump, X-ray system,
cell phone, GPS system, set top box, picture
frame, car, logistics system, airplane, DVR,
server, super computer and desktop all
running Linux."

17. The Future?
 The future is Open…RIGHT?

18. Did you know?
Atif Hussain

19. Apple
 The most recent Apple Macintosh OS (Mac
OS X) presents the same kind of
complications; older versions of Mac OS were
wholly proprietary, but Apple’s OS has been
redesigned so that it’s now based on a Unix
system with substantial contributions from
FLOSS programs. Over 200 FLOSS
applications have been added to the new Mac
OS.

20. Web Server
 The most popular web server has always been
OSS/FS since such data have been collected.
For example, Apache is the current #1 web
server.

21. PHP
 PHP is the web’s #1 Server-side Scripting
Language.

22. OpenSSH
 OpenSSH is the Internet’s #1 implementation
of the SSH security protocol.

23. MySQL
 MySQL’s market share is growing faster than
Windows’

24. Web Browser
 Internet Explorer has been losing market
share to FLOSS/FS web browsers (such as
Mozilla Firefox) since mid-2004, a trend
especially obvious in leading indicators such
as technology sites, web development sites,
and bloggers.

25. Internet Archive
 The Internet Archive -- the world’s largest
library in terms of the amount of text it retains
-- uses an OSS/FS operating system.

26. Red Hat
 Red Hat (a FLOSS vendor) responded more
rapidly than Microsoft or Sun.

27. Security
 FLOSS suppliers are 60% faster than
proprietary suppliers at responding to
vulnerability reports.

28. Intel
 Intel’s IT Vice President, Doug
Busch, reported savings of $200 million by
replacing costly Unix servers with cheaper
servers running GNU/Linux.

29. Amazon
 Amazon.com was able to cut $17 million in
technology expenses in a single quarter,
largely due to a switch to Linux. Amazon spent
$54 million on technology and content
expenses in its third quarter (ending Sept. 30),
compared with $71 million in the year-ago
quarter, and executives expected that
technology costs as a portion of net sales
would decrease by 20% this year.

30. I am not
anti-Microsoft.
Microsoft is anti-me
Conclusion