FLOSS:

PAST, PRESENT &

FUTURE
Atif Hussain
 PAST
History of FLOSS – Part 1
 1960s to 70s – Software sharing culture in US labs
(Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT)
 1976 – Bill Gates' “Open Letter to Hobbyists” advocating
that software should be paid for, including royalties
 Early 80s – LISP programming language was taken by
MIT, to the dismay of hackers.
 January 1984 – Richard Stallman quit job at MIT. Started
to worked on GNU, a set of programming tools.
 1986 – Free Software Foundation was born. To promote
'free software' and the GNU project.
 1990 – Bringing 'free software' to the corporate world with
Cygnus.
History of FLOSS – Part 2
 1991 – Linus Torvalds distributed a Unix-like kernel and
encouraged everyone to help improve it. The kernel was
later named “Linux” and then integrated with GNU into an
operating system called “GNU/Linux”.
 1992 – Xfree86 was born, the start of bringing GNU/Linux
to the desktop level.
 1993 – Debian and Slackware as implementations of
GNU/Linux were born.
 1994 – Apache, the now popular web server system, was
born.
 1995 – Red Hat was born.
History of FLOSS – Part 3
 1996 – KDE as desktop environment was born.
 1997 – GNU/Linux grabbed the 25% share of the server market
and grew at 25% per year.
 1997 – GNOME desktop manager was born.
 1998 – Netscape released Netscape Navigator code base under
open source. This paved the way for development of Mozilla
Firefox.
 1998 – The term 'open source' was coined. Led to the formation
of Open Source Initiative and formulation of open source
definition.
 1999 – Red Hat was transformed into a corporation. Other
corporations were established around “selling” Linux: not
charging for the software but for the support services.
 PRESENT
South America
 In 2005 the Government of Peru voted to adopt open
source across all its bodies. In the preamble to the bill,
the Peruvian government stressed that the choice was
made to ensure that key pillars of democracy were
safeguarded: "The basic principles which inspire the Bill
are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law."
 In December 2004, law in Venezuela (Decree 3390) went
into effect, mandating a two year transition to open
source in all public agencies. As of June 2009 this
ambitious transition is still under way.
 In February 2008, the Dominican Republic passed a law
to facilitate the migration of all public entities
(government, education, etc.) to Software Libre, and to
adopt open standards in the public sector.
Europe
 In Germany's federal state Thuringia the Ministry
for culture and education has launched a project
called "Linux für Schulen" (Linux for schools)
which is intended to further the influences of Open
Source software in public education. 
 Munich city civil service in Germany, 2003 started
migrating to free software.
Asia
 The Government of India has set up a resource centre for Free
and Open Source Software managed jointly by C-
DAC Chennai and Anna University, Chennai. It has one of its
node in Mumbai at VJTI College.
 A couple of hundred thousand copies of GNU/Linux have
been distributed across India, through local popular computer
magazines, at a price of just around $2. That includes both the
cost of a slick magazine and CD. This software can, of course,
be legally copied across as many computers as needed.
 Pakistan Ministry of Science and Technology advisor Salman
Ansari says that some 50,000 low cost computers are to be
installed in schools and colleges all over Pakistan. These will
be PII computers, each being sourced for less than $100 a
piece, he says.
Far East
 Vietnam - the Ministry of Information and
Communications has issued an instruction on using
open source software at state agencies.
 "Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software
Program" launched in 2004 saved millions on
proprietary software licences till 2008.
 A recent report at OpenSource.org has brought up
an interesting fact. The Malaysian government is
using 97% open source software.
 FUTURE
Sam Ramji, Senior director of platform technology,
Microsoft

 "We’ve made so much progress in terms of

opening the channels of dialogue between the OS
community, partners, vendors, and customers.
Dissonance won’t help anyone progress and
innovate. One of biggest misconceptions that we
continue to battle is that we compete with open
source. Microsoft does not compete with open
source."
Dave Rosenberg, CEO, Mulesource

 "I see the current tech climate as ripe with

opportunity for open source. With the murky U.S.
economy, companies are much less interested in
spending huge amounts of their budgets on up-
front license fees to proprietary vendors. IT shops
are more interested than ever in controlling their
fate -- and controlling their destiny. "
Robert Sutor, Vice president of open source and standards, IBM

 "The new challenges and pressures will arise

because of business issues, and not technology, in
my opinion. We have many, many excellent
developers in the open source communities. We
need to have many, many more excellent 'big
picture' leaders emerging from and for those
communities."
Zack Urlocker, Vice president of products, MySQL

 "Young folks starting their careers in IT are already

experts in open source; they've been using it for
most of their college life. For managers and older
developers, I think these are important skills to
have. Just like you couldn't get ahead in the late
1990s without Web development experience, I
think we're going to see the same trend around
open source. These will be the necessary technical
skills for career development."
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation

 Looking to the end of the 2010's, Zemlin draws on

the famous vision of Microsoft co-founder Bill
Gates for a computer on every desktop and every
home that drove that last revolution.
 "My vision," Zemlin said, "is to have a computer in
every gas pump, X-ray system, cell phone, GPS
system, set top box, picture frame, car, logistics
system, airplane, DVR, server, super computer and
desktop all running Linux."
The Future?
 The future is Open…RIGHT?