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The Future Of Open Source

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. Stallman's 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....