A brief history of open source - how free software has fought proprietary
Today we will tell how in due time commercial solutions practically crowded out freely distributed code. And which of the developers began to correct the situation.
/ photo by Peter Hamer CC BY-SA
The period of the Second World War was a time of technological breakthroughs for the United States. Cooperation of scientific institutions with military organizations has borne fruit in the field of radio , cryptography and semiconductors .
')
After the war, studies conducted laid the foundation for inventions such as the transistor , and scientific connections turned into business contacts. Began active development of computers.
The first commercial computer, the IBM 701, was unofficially called the Defense Calculator . From 1952 to 1955 only 19 copies of this computer came off the assembly line. It was impossible to buy them, but it was possible to rent for a month for a lot of money - about $ 12 thousand ($ 107 thousand by modern standards).
The list of companies that have allowed themselves such luxury, is expected to consist almost entirely of scientific and government organizations . At the same time for the money they received "bare" hardware without any software and operating system.
To simplify the work, engineers passed programs to each other. The spirit of academic cooperation reigned in the industry. Academic institutions, military customers, and large businesses created groups for the exchange of knowledge, and their products of labor were in the public domain .
The most famous groups whose members shared their “sources” with each other were PACT, SHARE and DECUS. The first of these, PACT - Project For the Advancement Of Coding Techniques - consisted of military contractors such as Lockheed and Douglas, as well as IBM.
Together, they developed a series of similar compilers for IBM 701 and 704, which used hashing methods. The group's leadership emphasized the “value of cooperation” in the work on such projects and promised to maintain this spirit in the future.
The successor to PACT was the SHARE group which appeared in 1955 and created the SOS (Share Operating System) operating system. This is a primitive, by modern standards, solution for the input and output of information has grown on the internal developments of General Motors. It was SOS that laid the foundation for the first batch processing operating systems that performed several tasks prepared by the same or different users. Such systems dominated the computer market in the late 50s - early 60s.
In 1961, another group called DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society) appeared. Its participants exchanged with each other programs on magnetic tapes. DECUS existed for a long time - in 1998, it still consisted of 50 thousand people.
If bundled with the IBM 701 was not software, then in subsequent mainframes it became more and more. All this software was included in the price of the system, and was supplied in the kit. From the point of view of regulators, this was an encroachment on monopoly. After some pressure and the threat of legal proceedings, IBM surrendered, and in 1969 they began selling software separately. This led to the emergence of a market for IBM machines.
Relatively high-level languages ​​- FORTRAN and COBOL - are widespread, and microcomputers have come to the homes of enthusiasts. Began to form the line between users and programmers. There are complex software systems, including those oriented for personal use. And their creators, quite logical, wanted to protect their work. This led to a public discussion: is it possible to patent software products? How are intellectual property laws applied to them?
In 1974, a special commission was organized, which enshrined the rights of programmers in US law. Since then, software makers have been on a par with inventors. A little later, the US Court of Appeal decided that copyright extended to computer programs. Developers were able to control who uses the results of their work. And in 1983, free software gave way to proprietary software. Then IBM ceased to disclose the source code of their programs.
Thus, the whole epoch of free software exchange has ended. But there were people who were not going to put up with it. People thanks to whom free software is flourishing now.
The software market in the 1960s reminded Cherkizovsky: there were a lot of things, but they didn’t mix well with each other. Almost every new computer model of the OS was written from scratch. More and more programs were released with closed code, and the lack of standardization increased the cost of their development.
The most vividly illustrate the position of the IT industry at that time is possible using the example of the Multics operating system.
MIT, Bell Labs and General Electrics took part in its creation, but they could not agree on a vision. The tasks assigned to the developers were ambitious, and the staff consisted of young, inexperienced programmers. The result of a five-year development was a system that was not destined to find success in the computer market. A separate article was subsequently devoted to a detailed analysis of the failures that contributed to the failure.
Shortly after the release of the system, Bell Labs abandoned the project, considering it a waste of time. But not all employees shared this opinion. For Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, this experience served as a lesson in OS architecture. They saw the potential inherent in the modular design of Multics - in it, each task is performed by a separate utility - and decided to develop their own OS.
In the summer of 1969, UNICS was born. Thompson wrote her first version on the PDP-7 mini- computer while on vacation. After the project migrated to Bell Labs, where he changed the name to UNIX and received a small team of developers.
/ photo by Jason Scott CC BY
After the open source system was presented to the public in 1973, it was unexpectedly for Bell Labs managers to begin to rapidly take over the academic market.
The reasons for this were four factors:
Availability. Antitrust laws specifically regulated Bell Labs, which was a subsidiary of telecommunications giants AT & T and Western Electric.
In 1956, firms made a deal with the government, the terms of which limited their commercial activities outside the main business. In particular, the sale of products that are not directly related to telecommunications, should have been carried out at a "nominal price". This condition extended to UNIX. You can read more about the legal aspect of the situation and its consequences in the book “ A quarter of a century of UNIX ” by Peter Salus and this research work .
The result of the regulation of Bell Labs activity was the fact that academic institutions were able to purchase operating systems at a price slightly higher than the cost of a physical copy.
Orientation on minicomputers. Until 1975, there was no concept of a “personal computer” as such. Public attention was mainly focused on mainframes. But the market for minicomputers — low-power alternatives to mainframes — has grown rapidly. Largely due to the limited budget of the project, UNIX was originally developed specifically for such machines.
The third version of the operating system was sharpened under the DEC PDP-11, more than 170 thousand copies of which rolled off the assembly line in the 70s. For comparison, sales of the popular IBM 1401 mainframe did not exceed 20 thousand units for the entire existence of the model. As a result, the OS gained a large number of users in the amateur and educational segments.
Simplicity. Large monolithic programs are hard to write and even harder to modify. UNIX consisted of small modules, each of which was responsible for a separate function and was easily changed. Moreover, since version 4, the operating system has been almost entirely written in high-level C language (and not in low-level assembler). As a result, it was easier for university students to figure out how the OS works.
Portability. To run UNIX on a different architecture, it was enough to port the C compiler. For this reason, working versions of UNIX for new processors appeared quickly. This became especially important in the era of microcomputers, which began in the late 1970s. UNIX ports for home machines based on Intel 8086 and Motorola 68000 were very popular.
UNIX users around the world, mainly academics, actively exchanged software for the system. Enthusiast communities existed in Britain, Australia and Japan. In 1975, more than forty American educational institutions used this operating system.
One of the first academic institutions that began to actively use UNIX was a branch of the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Robert Fabry received a copy of the system personally from Ken Thompson in 1973. Employees of the organization quickly fell in love with UNIX and started their own developments to improve the OS.
University additions to the system were distributed under the name Berkley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of BSD included a modified Pascal compiler, the code for which was obtained directly from Thompson, and the text editor Ex - now known as Vi . Many of the BSD innovations have been implemented in the "official" versions of UNIX. But AT & T was unhappy that control over the fate of the system was leaving the company.
The collaboration of the University of Berkeley with the DARPA military agency, which introduced advanced network technologies to BSD, exacerbated the situation. As is typical of an academic project, BSD commercial licenses were available at a low price of a thousand dollars for the market - and were sold in thousands. For AT & T, it was a lost business.
While Berkeley employees used UNIX code primarily for scientific purposes, other companies viewed the popularity of the system as a chance to make money. In 1978, the first commercial C compiler appeared. AT & T decided to put an end to this and at sunset in the 70s they restricted the distribution of the OS source code. Lawyers of the company resumed the fight for the right to fully monetize the product and protect it from third-party modifications.
In 1983, Bell Labs officially “separated” from AT & T and Western Electric. UNIX has become a completely commercial product, and its value has increased to tens of thousands of dollars - often more expensive than the hardware on which the operating system worked.
/ photo by Sam Williams CC BY-SA / Richard Stallman
In the 1970s, Richard Stallman worked as a programmer in the laboratory of artificial intelligence systems MIT. He was known as one of the authors of EMACS - a text editor for the PDP family of mini-computers. Like many other software of that time, the source code of EMACS was freely distributed, and the final product was the sum of the efforts of users.
All changes in the culture of academic development occurred in Richard's eyes. The university has ceased to be a place for an open exchange of ideas and software tools. Even the creator of the version of EMACS for UNIX, which initially allowed the free distribution of his program, in 1983 sold it to a commercial distributor. Stallman considered such an act sabotage.
He knew that he needed to do something, but it was not easy to correct this situation. Free distribution of programs did not have solid legal ground under them. Most of these products were simply considered “public domain”, and nothing prevented them from commercializing their modified versions.
Moreover, the development for proprietary systems limited the distribution of the product, requiring the user to purchase commercial and, from the point of view of Stallman, amoral software.
The decision to use UNIX as a basis was not accidental - Richard attracted the portability of the operating system. How this project developed and what it led to - we will tell in one of the following materials.
Posts from the First Corporate IaaS Blog:
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/ photo by Peter Hamer CC BY-SA
Between science and national security
The period of the Second World War was a time of technological breakthroughs for the United States. Cooperation of scientific institutions with military organizations has borne fruit in the field of radio , cryptography and semiconductors .
')
After the war, studies conducted laid the foundation for inventions such as the transistor , and scientific connections turned into business contacts. Began active development of computers.
The first commercial computer, the IBM 701, was unofficially called the Defense Calculator . From 1952 to 1955 only 19 copies of this computer came off the assembly line. It was impossible to buy them, but it was possible to rent for a month for a lot of money - about $ 12 thousand ($ 107 thousand by modern standards).
The list of companies that have allowed themselves such luxury, is expected to consist almost entirely of scientific and government organizations . At the same time for the money they received "bare" hardware without any software and operating system.
To simplify the work, engineers passed programs to each other. The spirit of academic cooperation reigned in the industry. Academic institutions, military customers, and large businesses created groups for the exchange of knowledge, and their products of labor were in the public domain .
Program Exchange Period
The most famous groups whose members shared their “sources” with each other were PACT, SHARE and DECUS. The first of these, PACT - Project For the Advancement Of Coding Techniques - consisted of military contractors such as Lockheed and Douglas, as well as IBM.
Together, they developed a series of similar compilers for IBM 701 and 704, which used hashing methods. The group's leadership emphasized the “value of cooperation” in the work on such projects and promised to maintain this spirit in the future.
The successor to PACT was the SHARE group which appeared in 1955 and created the SOS (Share Operating System) operating system. This is a primitive, by modern standards, solution for the input and output of information has grown on the internal developments of General Motors. It was SOS that laid the foundation for the first batch processing operating systems that performed several tasks prepared by the same or different users. Such systems dominated the computer market in the late 50s - early 60s.
In 1961, another group called DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society) appeared. Its participants exchanged with each other programs on magnetic tapes. DECUS existed for a long time - in 1998, it still consisted of 50 thousand people.
Thanks to scientific collaboration and software exchange , Interlisp and UCI Lisp programming languages appeared , and this culture gave impetus to the development of an open-source Unix operating system. But in the late 60s - early 70s several important events occurred that stopped the development of open source. They made the program a product that can be monetized.
Paid software and intellectual property
If bundled with the IBM 701 was not software, then in subsequent mainframes it became more and more. All this software was included in the price of the system, and was supplied in the kit. From the point of view of regulators, this was an encroachment on monopoly. After some pressure and the threat of legal proceedings, IBM surrendered, and in 1969 they began selling software separately. This led to the emergence of a market for IBM machines.
Relatively high-level languages ​​- FORTRAN and COBOL - are widespread, and microcomputers have come to the homes of enthusiasts. Began to form the line between users and programmers. There are complex software systems, including those oriented for personal use. And their creators, quite logical, wanted to protect their work. This led to a public discussion: is it possible to patent software products? How are intellectual property laws applied to them?
In 1974, a special commission was organized, which enshrined the rights of programmers in US law. Since then, software makers have been on a par with inventors. A little later, the US Court of Appeal decided that copyright extended to computer programs. Developers were able to control who uses the results of their work. And in 1983, free software gave way to proprietary software. Then IBM ceased to disclose the source code of their programs.
Thus, the whole epoch of free software exchange has ended. But there were people who were not going to put up with it. People thanks to whom free software is flourishing now.
Multics lessons
The software market in the 1960s reminded Cherkizovsky: there were a lot of things, but they didn’t mix well with each other. Almost every new computer model of the OS was written from scratch. More and more programs were released with closed code, and the lack of standardization increased the cost of their development.
The most vividly illustrate the position of the IT industry at that time is possible using the example of the Multics operating system.
MIT, Bell Labs and General Electrics took part in its creation, but they could not agree on a vision. The tasks assigned to the developers were ambitious, and the staff consisted of young, inexperienced programmers. The result of a five-year development was a system that was not destined to find success in the computer market. A separate article was subsequently devoted to a detailed analysis of the failures that contributed to the failure.
Shortly after the release of the system, Bell Labs abandoned the project, considering it a waste of time. But not all employees shared this opinion. For Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, this experience served as a lesson in OS architecture. They saw the potential inherent in the modular design of Multics - in it, each task is performed by a separate utility - and decided to develop their own OS.
In the summer of 1969, UNICS was born. Thompson wrote her first version on the PDP-7 mini- computer while on vacation. After the project migrated to Bell Labs, where he changed the name to UNIX and received a small team of developers.
/ photo by Jason Scott CC BY
UNIX and Academic Market
After the open source system was presented to the public in 1973, it was unexpectedly for Bell Labs managers to begin to rapidly take over the academic market.
The reasons for this were four factors:
Availability. Antitrust laws specifically regulated Bell Labs, which was a subsidiary of telecommunications giants AT & T and Western Electric.
In 1956, firms made a deal with the government, the terms of which limited their commercial activities outside the main business. In particular, the sale of products that are not directly related to telecommunications, should have been carried out at a "nominal price". This condition extended to UNIX. You can read more about the legal aspect of the situation and its consequences in the book “ A quarter of a century of UNIX ” by Peter Salus and this research work .
The result of the regulation of Bell Labs activity was the fact that academic institutions were able to purchase operating systems at a price slightly higher than the cost of a physical copy.
Orientation on minicomputers. Until 1975, there was no concept of a “personal computer” as such. Public attention was mainly focused on mainframes. But the market for minicomputers — low-power alternatives to mainframes — has grown rapidly. Largely due to the limited budget of the project, UNIX was originally developed specifically for such machines.
The third version of the operating system was sharpened under the DEC PDP-11, more than 170 thousand copies of which rolled off the assembly line in the 70s. For comparison, sales of the popular IBM 1401 mainframe did not exceed 20 thousand units for the entire existence of the model. As a result, the OS gained a large number of users in the amateur and educational segments.
Simplicity. Large monolithic programs are hard to write and even harder to modify. UNIX consisted of small modules, each of which was responsible for a separate function and was easily changed. Moreover, since version 4, the operating system has been almost entirely written in high-level C language (and not in low-level assembler). As a result, it was easier for university students to figure out how the OS works.
Portability. To run UNIX on a different architecture, it was enough to port the C compiler. For this reason, working versions of UNIX for new processors appeared quickly. This became especially important in the era of microcomputers, which began in the late 1970s. UNIX ports for home machines based on Intel 8086 and Motorola 68000 were very popular.
UNIX users around the world, mainly academics, actively exchanged software for the system. Enthusiast communities existed in Britain, Australia and Japan. In 1975, more than forty American educational institutions used this operating system.
BSD Birth
One of the first academic institutions that began to actively use UNIX was a branch of the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Robert Fabry received a copy of the system personally from Ken Thompson in 1973. Employees of the organization quickly fell in love with UNIX and started their own developments to improve the OS.
University additions to the system were distributed under the name Berkley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of BSD included a modified Pascal compiler, the code for which was obtained directly from Thompson, and the text editor Ex - now known as Vi . Many of the BSD innovations have been implemented in the "official" versions of UNIX. But AT & T was unhappy that control over the fate of the system was leaving the company.
The collaboration of the University of Berkeley with the DARPA military agency, which introduced advanced network technologies to BSD, exacerbated the situation. As is typical of an academic project, BSD commercial licenses were available at a low price of a thousand dollars for the market - and were sold in thousands. For AT & T, it was a lost business.
While Berkeley employees used UNIX code primarily for scientific purposes, other companies viewed the popularity of the system as a chance to make money. In 1978, the first commercial C compiler appeared. AT & T decided to put an end to this and at sunset in the 70s they restricted the distribution of the OS source code. Lawyers of the company resumed the fight for the right to fully monetize the product and protect it from third-party modifications.
In 1983, Bell Labs officially “separated” from AT & T and Western Electric. UNIX has become a completely commercial product, and its value has increased to tens of thousands of dollars - often more expensive than the hardware on which the operating system worked.
/ photo by Sam Williams CC BY-SA / Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman and the birth of GNU
In the 1970s, Richard Stallman worked as a programmer in the laboratory of artificial intelligence systems MIT. He was known as one of the authors of EMACS - a text editor for the PDP family of mini-computers. Like many other software of that time, the source code of EMACS was freely distributed, and the final product was the sum of the efforts of users.
All changes in the culture of academic development occurred in Richard's eyes. The university has ceased to be a place for an open exchange of ideas and software tools. Even the creator of the version of EMACS for UNIX, which initially allowed the free distribution of his program, in 1983 sold it to a commercial distributor. Stallman considered such an act sabotage.
He knew that he needed to do something, but it was not easy to correct this situation. Free distribution of programs did not have solid legal ground under them. Most of these products were simply considered “public domain”, and nothing prevented them from commercializing their modified versions.
Moreover, the development for proprietary systems limited the distribution of the product, requiring the user to purchase commercial and, from the point of view of Stallman, amoral software.
Stallman faced two tasks - to create a free operating system and a legal basis for its distribution. Therefore, in 1983, the GNU project (GNU's Not Unix) was born, designed to become an open and improved copy of a proprietary platform at that time.
The decision to use UNIX as a basis was not accidental - Richard attracted the portability of the operating system. How this project developed and what it led to - we will tell in one of the following materials.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/444438/
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