One more reference: Wikipedia's history of open source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_history) has a pretty good discussion of the early days of software development - when pretty much everything was open source, but the term had not been coined yet.
Miles Miles Fidelman wrote: > Charlie, > > Charlie Schweik wrote: > >> See >> http://www.umass.edu/opensource/schweik/Chapter_2_schweik_final_draft.pdf >> >> This book still is being finalized and not yet published. If anyone on >> this list reads this chapter, I'd appreciate any comments you may have. >> If you Daniele, or anyone else uses content from this in some capacity, >> I'd appreciate you contacting me so I can give you information on how to >> cite it. >> >> > Since you asked.... :-) > > A few comments: > > 1. I seriously question the characterization of open source as primarily > driven by volunteers. > History says otherwise. > > 2. I'd look for some better sources re. monitary support for early open > source projects. > If you look a little harder, you'll find that almost all widely-used open > source software > started with somebody who was working at a job that paid them to write an > initial > code base - be it working on a a government contract or grant, or working on > software > as in internal IT staffer. > > The examples I always point to are: > > - Apache (started as the NCSA web daemon) > > - Unix (it all goes back to Bell Labs, with the BSD variations going back to > Berkeley) > > - Sendmail > > - Postgres > > And the list goes on. (One interesting list of very early projects: > http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Some_dates_open_source.html) > > Yes, a sizeable portion of contributors are volunteers - but some historical > spelunking quickly points out that most projects > started with someone who was being paid for their time. (Richard Stallman > might be the exception, though MIT provided > for his support in various forms). > > 3. Historically, the motivations you list as "academic and scientific > motivation #2 and #3" are the earliest and oldest motivations > for open source code - dating back to the period when government funded work > automatically entered the public domain (thus > predating the entire notion of open source licenses). Almost ALL early > software was funded by the government (notably > DARPA and NSF), was shared as academic research, and automatically entered > the public domain. > > Hope this is useful, > > Miles Fidelman > > > -- Miles R. Fidelman, Director of Government Programs Traverse Technologies 145 Tremont Street, 3rd Floor Boston, MA 02111 [email protected] 857-362-8314 www.traversetechnologies.com _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
