A Briefer History of Open Source

Talk "A Briefer History of Open Source: A Computational (and Human) Perspective" delivered at Data Umbrella

https://www.meetup.com/data-umbrella/events/298708103/

Video https://youtu.be/LLciYo3rqTQ

Transcript

1. A Briefer History Of Open Source a Computational (and Human) Perspective Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez <hello@juanlu.space> 2024-02-13 @ Data Umbrella
2. Who is this guy? * Cano Rodríguez, Juan Luis (he/him/él) * Aerospace Engineer turned coder turned developer advocate turned... * Passionate about tech communities and the Solidarity Economy ♻️ * Product Manager for Kedro, an open source pipeline framework, at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey 🔶 * Organizer of the PyData Madrid monthly meetup (ex Python España, ex PyCon Spain) 🐍 * Contributor to the SciPy and PyData ecosystem Let's connect! https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanluiscanor/
3. ⚠️ Not a historian ⚠️ Caveats apply: * South European-centric perspective * Cutoff points are arbitrary * Possibly misses key events and people * Might contain opinions * I like this topic too much
4. -1979 The rise and fall of hacker culture
5. 1969 - Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others start developing the UNIX family of operating systems at Bell Labs 1971 - UNIX first published internally 1972 - First attempt at rewriting the kernel in the new programming language C 1973 - UNIX announced outside Bell Labs The UNIX philosophy: "Make each program do one thing well"
6. 1976 - "An Act for the general revision of the Copyright Law, title 17 of the United States Code, and for other purposes", aka the Copyright Act of 1976 * Software fell under the definition of "literary works", hence protected by copyright * "Fair use" doctrine introduced
7. 1979 - Brian Reid placed time bombs in the Scribe markup language to restrict unlicensed access "A crime against humanity"
8. 1980-1989 The GNU Project and the Four Freedoms
9. An incident with a printer... ...started a revolution
10. "Starting this Thanksgiving, I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for GNU's Not Unix) and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs, and equipment are greatly needed." Richard Stallman (USA), 1983
11. 1985 - GNU Manifesto and Free Software Foundation 1986 - The Four Freedoms 0. Freedom to run the program for any purpose 1. Freedom to study and change the program 2. Freedom to redistribute copies 3. Freedom to distribute modified versions
12. "To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer". ...and a huge misconception?
13. Meanwhile, in Switzerland...
14. 1990-1998 The Linux bazaar and the Open Source Definition
15. 1991 - World Wide Web open to the public 1993 - CERN makes WWW protocol and code available royalty free 1993 - First web browser: Mosaic
16. "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready." 1991 - Linux is announced Linus Torvalds (Finland), 1991
17. ...and dozens of Linux distributions start to appear 1993 - Slackware 1993 - Debian 1994 - SUSE Linux (commercial) 1995 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux (commercial)
18. 1991 - Python (Guido van Rossum, Netherlands) 1991 - R (Ross Ihaka, New Zealand) 1991 - Vim (Bram Moolenaar, Netherlands) 1992 - X Window System ported to Linux 1993 - Lua (Roberto Ierusalimschy and others, Brazil) 1994 - LaTeX (Leslie Lamport, USA) 1995 - Numeric, precursor of NumPy (Jim Hugunin, Travis Oliphant and others, USA) 1996 - Java (James Gosling, Canada)
19. 1997 - "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" original essay published by Eric S. Raymond (USA) Cathedral: Closed development (GNU Emacs, GCC) Bazaar: Open development (Linux) Linus Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"
20. 1994 - Netscape corporation founded 1995 - JavaScript introduced 1995 - Netscape goes public 1996 - First Google computer at Stanford Beginning of the dot-com bubble...
21. Open Source term became official in 1998 * Influenced by Raymond's ideas, Netscape releases the source code of their browser: the precursor of Firefox * Christine Peterson (USA) suggests the term "open source" in a strategy meeting * Bruce Perens founds the Open Source Initiative (OSI) * Tim O'Reilly (USA) organizes an "Open Source Summit"
22. ...and the divide appeared
23. 1999-2011 The Digital Age and the Big Data explosion
24. 2020 - dot-com bubble (peak) dot-com crash
25. 2001 - Corporate animosity towards "open source" reaches its peak
26. ...while open source projects start organizing 1999 - Apache Software Foundation (USA) 2000 - Linux Foundation (USA) 2001 - Python Software Foundation (USA) 2004 - Eclipse Foundation (Belgium)
27. 2003 - Google File System paper 2004 - MapReduce paper 2005 - Yahoo starts implementing Google's ideas 2006 - First public release of Hadoop ...and contenders embrace sharing knowledge
28. 2005 - Linus Torvalds (Finland) writes git in 1 month 2005- Junio Hamano takes over maintenance of git 2008 - GitHub launches A new era of collaborative software development
29. 2011 - Marc Andreesssen: "Why Software is Eating the World"
30. 2012-2018 "Open Source is eating software", but what do maintainers eat?
31. Python grows spectacularly driven by the data science craze
32. 2012 - Vulnerable code is accidentally committed to OpenSSL 2014 - Heartbleed vulnerability is revealed ...but the world discovers that open source is not sustainable
33. ...and lack of governance creates embarrasing situations 2016 - Azer Koçulu pulls left-pad from NPM
34. 2016 - "Roads and Bridges", Nadia Eghbal (USA)
35. 2015 - Fair Source 2016 - Business Source License 2018 - Commons Clause 2018 - Server-Side Public License 2016 - Coopyleft 2018 - Hippocratic License ("Do No Harm") Some of these licenses are submitted to the Open Source Initiative for consideration - they are all rejected The open source ecosystem begins to fragment
36. 2018 - Microsoft acquires GitHub ...and old enemies become friends
37. 2019-2023 Post-open source and the GenAI volcano
38. The current generation of generative AI models was trained on copyrighted material
39. ...And the sustainability of it all is not clear
40. We're writing the future as we speak
41. Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez <hello@juanlu.space> 2024-02-13 @ Data Umbrella ? 2024- What's next?