History of free and open source software

To understand open source, we must go back to the early days of computer science.

Public domain software

During the 1950s and 1960s, the price of software was low compared to the necessary hardware. Any software that was produced was mainly produced by academics and corporate research teams. It was normal for the source code to be distributed with the software – normally as public domain software. This means that the software is freely available without ownership, copyright, trademark, or patent. These principles of openness and cooperation had a great influence on the hacker culture at that time.

In the late 1960s, the rise of operating systems and compilers increased the costs of software. This was driven by a growing software industry that competed with hardware vendors that bundled their software together with their hardware.

During the 1970s and 1980s, it became common to sell licenses for the use of software and in 1983...