MILESTONES

The making of Unix Operating System

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)

Linux

MILESTONES

The origins of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) can be traced to the innovation of Unix Operating System. Unix was a text-book operating system which was strong in fundamentals and was well described in technical papers, books and magazines. At that time, operating systems were complex, arcane and written mostly in assembly language. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie thought differently and wrote Unix in mostly in C language, making it simple, easy to understand and use. There was a certain openness and freshness about Unix that attracted software developers to it. The inherent strength of Unix has ensured that its usage kept on growing all the time. Now, about forty years since its invention, Unix and its clones are running successfully on computers ranging from tiny embedded systems to supercomputers as if it were a recent invention.

In the mid-1980s, Richard Stallman pioneered the concept of free software, where free was linked to freedom of using and modifying the software. It essentially meant availability of source code along with executable version of software. Free and Open Source software gained popularity and today it is synonymous with high-quality software like GNU software tools, Linux, Apache servers, X-Window, GNOME, KDE, to name a few. The list could well run into multiple pages.

FLOSS has gained popularity and is today a well established way of making, distributing and using software, thanks to the tremendous contribution of Linux. Linux has made it possible for anyone to use a Unix-like operating system, free of cost, something that was costing around $2000 in late eighties and early nineties. But Linus Torvalds has made a unique contribution to the software field by developing Linux from a scratch, something that was unimaginable before the advent of Linux. It was unimaginable just like it was once unimaginable that an operating system could be primarily written in a high-level language line C language before Unix came along.