Origins of open source licensing¶

Unix Operating system¶

The two models for software licensing (open source and proprietary) trace their origins from a common source: the Unix operating system.
Unix was developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was the first general-purpose operating system.
At that time, AT&T’s market position was so dominant that the US Justice Department issued a consent decree barring AT&T from engaging in commercial activities outside the field of its telephone service, which was AT&T’s primary business.
Because of the consent decree, AT&T could not exploit Unix as a commercial product, so Bell Labs gave Unix away in source code form under terms that allowed its modification and redistribution.
This led to Unix’s widespread use and popularity among computer scientists in the 1970s and 1980s.

After the US Justice Department lifted the consent decree in 1983, AT&T pivoted to commercialize Unix as a proprietary product and adopted more restrictive licensing terms that allowed Unix to be redistributed only in object code format.
Meanwhile, the 1980s saw the advent of microcomputers (PCs), which led to the standardization of software.
This standardization, in turn, encouraged companies to distribute their software in binary-only form because there was less need for users to investigate or troubleshoot source code.
And so proprietary licensing became the dominant model for licensing software.

Interest in open source licensing reemerged in the 1990s with the development of the Linux operating system.
Since the privatization of UNIX, the demand had swelled for an operating system that would be a free alternative to UNIX.
To be useful, operating system needed both an operating system kernel and the tools necessary to install, run and develop programs for it.
Linus Torvalds, a teenager in Finland, developed the first Linux kernel as a school project. Meanwhile, the GNU Project has been formed to develop those tools, and when those two parts were combined, a free alternative to UNIX was available.
The combined operating system, most commonly called Linux, was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), a licensing model that was created by Richard Stallman of the GNU Project.
The GPL granted recipients unfettered rights to redistribute software with the condition that the source code could not be kept secret.
As Linux grew in popularity, with thousands of contributors and billions of users, the industry learned to follow and adopt GPL’s terms.
By the late 1990s, GPL and the open source licensing paradigm more broadly gained traction and industry-wide acceptance. In the 2010s, it has nearly eclipsed proprietary license in importance to the technology industry.”