Raymond’s 1997 essay titled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” is seen as another watershed in the free software movement. He also innovated the first copyleft software license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), which required anyone who enhanced his source code to likewise publish their edited version freely to all.Įric S. Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation, and would go on to drive the development of an open source alternative to the AT&T-owned Unix operating system, among other applications. Stallman felt that “software should be free–as in speech, not beer,” and championed the notion of software that was freely available for customization. Programmer Richard Stallman chafed at the notion that users could not customize proprietary software however they saw fit to accomplish their work. As personal computing brought applications to every corporate desk and many households, the market for software became intensely competitive and software publishers became increasingly alert to infringements of their property rights.Ī rebellion of sorts against the restrictions and limitations of proprietary software began in 1983. This fueled the growth of independent software publishing as an industry, with proprietary source code as the primary source of revenue. The Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established in 1974 and concluded that software code was a category of creative work suitable for copyright protection. Organizations programmed their own software, and code sharing was a common practice. Until the mid-1970s, computer code was seen as implicit to the operation of the computer hardware, and not unique intellectual property subject to copyright protection.
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