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1969 UNIX Development Begins. Bell Labs pulls out of the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (MULTICS), a joint project to create an operating system along with MIT and General Electric. Bell Labs Researcher Ken Thompson begins work on the program that would become UNIX. The word choice is a play on MULTICS, replacing the "multi" with "uni" and the "cs" with "x". The UNIX operating system is completed by Ken Thompson and another Bell Labs researcher Dennis Richtie in 1973. 1981 Sendmail U.C. Berkeley graduate Eric Allman releases Sendmail to route messages between the University of California at Berkeley's computer systems and Arpanet, the government computer network that preceded the Internet. (By now, Sendmail is installed on approximately 80% of all mail servers connected to the Net.) 1984 Free Software Foundation In partial response to legal battles between AT&T, software developers, and the University of California at Berkeley over the copyrighting of Unix, MIT graduate Richard Stallman starts the Free Software Foundation at MIT. The GNU project is founded to construct a Unix-based operating system for which the code will be kept publicly available. (GNU is named after the recursive acronym GNU's Not Unix.) Stallman also devises "copylefting" and the GNU public liscence which stipulate that software can be improved upon and sold for profit as long as it remains "free" -- not gratis but open to revision. Other projects developed out of the foundation are programmer utilities like the emacs text editor. 1986 PERL Programmer Larry Wall releases PERL (Practical Extraction & Report Language) to Usenet where it is collaboratively developed. The nearly ubiquitous Perl is used to scan text files, create HTML files on demand, and troll the Net. 1989 Cygnus Solutions Cygnus Solutions is founded based on a free software model to provide custom-engineering services and support for open source software. It is the first business built upon freeware technologies. 1990 Richard Stallman Wins a MacArthur "Genius" Grant 1991 Linux Kernel Conceived Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student in Finland, develops the kernel -- the center of communications between the operating system and the CPU -- for a PC-based, free operating system that uses GNU. Linux is released under the GNU Public License. 1994 Red Hat, Caldera, and HotWired Debut Marc Ewing, a grad of Carnegie Mellon's computer science department, and Robert Young, the head of a free software distributor, join together to form Red Hat to do Linux distribution. Another free software sales company, Caldera, is also founded. Both market their own versions of Linux. UC Berkeley graduate Brian Behlendorf builds the Web magazine HotWired. Because the project demands unprecendented utilities (like password authentication), Behlendorf begins revising the free server software available from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In 1995 Behlendorf assembles the "Apache" Group, a core of volunteer programmers who assist Behelendorf in building an entirely new software. (Apache gets its name from its makeshift origins -- it was first called " A PAtCHy server") 1997 "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" Eric Raymond delivers his influential paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," an analysis of why the Linux development model succeeds, at the Linux Kongress. 1998 Jan. Navigator Code to be Released Netscape announces it will give out source to Navigator. The New York Times writes shortly afterward that Netscape "has made a course correction that may profoundly affect the commercial software industry." 1998 Feb. "Open Source" Coined The term "open source" is devised at a brainstorming session in Palo Alto. Heated debate ensues within the hacker community over terminology, specifically the difference between "open source" vs. "free software." The conflict is largely rooted in divergent perceptions of the relationship between the business world and the hacker community. "Open source" is embraced by commercial-friendly developers seeking to distance themselves from the ideological stance of Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement. 1998 March 31 Navigator Code Released Netscape releases the source code for the 5.0 version of Netscape Comunicator Standard Edition, the first mainstream commercial product to go to open source. Within hours a group of Australian programmers, the Mozilla Crypto Group, adds a cryptographic feature to allow secure Internet transactions. Consumer advocate Ralph Nadar beseeches several PC makers to sell their computers with open source alternatives to the Microsoft system. 1998 June GIMP Developed GIMP 1.0, the Linux equivalent of Photoshop, is released. (GNU Image Manipulation Program.) 1998 August GNOME Development Begins The GNOME Project begins, with the aim of building a complete, user-friendly desktop based entirely on free software. (GNU Network Object Model Environment.) 1998 October Halloween Memos Become Public Eric Raymond acquires lengthy internal memos written by Microsoft engineer Vinod Valloppillil and posts them to the Web. The Halloween Documents, as the memos come to be known, argue that Linux and other open source software "pose a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft," not only because of its commercial viability but because it is predicated on a completely different business model. Attacking open source, the memos point out, would entail fighting a "process rather than a company." 1998 Dec. Sendmail Goes Private Sendmail becomes a commercial company with proprietary code. The company promises to continue to make regular updates to the open source version of the software.
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