1970 to 1979: Computers and Software Begin Creating Wealth - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 160

The U.S. strength in computers and software is a strong military asset.
However, other countries are attempting to catch up, with China being the number
two country in usage of computers and software for military purposes. In fact, Ch-
ina currently has a larger cyberwarfare unit than the United States.
Open-Source Software
Surprisingly, the field of open-source software has grown about as fast as other
new software fields. Even more surprising, the quality of open-source packages
often compares favorably to commercial software applications, some of which are
quite expensive.
The open-source topic is included in this chapter on the 1970s because one of
the founders of the concept, Richard Stallman, began to share software developed
at MIT with other universities from 1970 forward.
The phrase “open source” means that the source code of the software is avail-
able to the user community and users can modify the code if they wish. The cat-
egory of open source overlaps but is not identical to the category of freeware . As
the name implies, freeware is distributed at no cost. However, not every freeware
application provides source code.
Some open-source software ranks among the most widely used applications of
the modern era. Several examples of open-source applications with millions of
users include Mozilla Firefox; the Android operating system; and the Open Of-
fice suite of tools that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a slide program, a
drawing package, and more.
Many programming languages and their compilers and tools are also open
source, such as Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. The Linux operating system is also
open source.
Just because an application is open source does not give users unlimited per-
mission to do anything they want with the application and its source code. Many
open-source products are distributed using the well-known GNU General Public
License (GPL), which was created by Richard Stallman of the Free Software
Foundation. The GNU license allows users to modify the code, but products using
either the original or modified code must also use the GNU license. This is called
copy left as opposed to copy right .
There are websites and services that list open-source and freeware tools.
SourceForge.net is such a site. There are currently around 50,000 available open-
source applications, roughly half of which use the GNU GPL license.