The concept of open source is as old as the concept of communities, where enthusiastic artisans have always passed on their lore to new generations in an effort to create a positive legacy for themselves. The scientific community has always been "open source" - the tradition of sharing discoveries, including methods of testing those discoveries, is the basis for scientific endeavour. Scientists, rather than each reinventing the wheel, verify the validity of one another's work and then add their own refinements and enhancements, or even quantum leaps, with the benefit of insight gained from studying "prior art."

This idea of building on the accepted foundations of knowledge, the basis of scientific culture, naturally passed into the ethos of the computing world with the advent of the first computer networks in the 60's and 70's where the first young software "hackers" - a self-deprecating reference to "hack writers" designed to downplay the cleverness of their early software endeavours - reached out of their lonely, usually secluded and windowless labs at universities and government laboratories sprinkled around the world to fashion the first virtual communities.

These hackers, having themselves designed and "hacked" together the original infrastructure of what has now evolved into the Internet, were very aware of the implications of their new virtual world. They recognised that they could never fully harness the vast and quickly evolving power of these computers if they worked in isolation. Working together, in addition to being immensely more productive, was much more fun. They created a virtual society in which the term "hacker" became a term of respect rather than an insult, and value was exchanged not with money (which would have been seen as too cumbersome - this was a few years before credit cards, online transactions, and PayPal...), but rather through software capabilities in the form of source code.

It was only later, in the 70's, with the advent of cheaper computers that businesses could afford - previously computing was only feasible for government organisations and universities - that the proprietary world of computing emerged. Mechanical calculator and till manufacturer, International Business Machines, along with only a few of their contemporaries, recognised the shifting paradigm and began reinventing their business around digital computing machines. Their biggest problem was not building the hardware - it was convincing businesses that their hardware was worth buying. To do that, it needed to solve business' problems - and those solutions were built with software.

So companies like IBM, Hewlet Packard, Atlantic Telegraph & Telephone (now AT&T), Texas Instruments, and the Digital Equipment Corp courted the early hackers, pulling them out of their hacker community and into highly paid but clausterphobic work environments where they were treated as golden geese, or essentially valuable freaks. The early hacker ethos suffered a major setback, but save for a few astute individuals like Richard Stallman at MIT, few realised the implications of this change to proprietary computing before it was too late.

Software development went from being a mystical art - practiced by a tightly knit geographically diverse group of artisans who had forged their own ethos and a self selected open society - to a fragmented, "clean room" world of intrigue and mistrust, where the "all's fair in love and business" mentality made hackers suspicious of their former friends due to their new corporate stock options, fat salary packages, and unclear loyalties. Source code that used to wing its way blissfully across phone lines all over the world was now battened down in safes, and hoarded as the "crown jewels" of some of the world's richest corporations - the world of computing had closed the source - and the hacker community was largely destroyed.

The hacker ethos, sick of being trapped behind intellectual property protections and non-disclosure agreements on one hand, and the prohibitive cost of networked computing for private individuals on the other only re-asserted itself with the advent of the personal computer and the fledgeling Internet. The Internet was a framework built by socially aware visionaries, on behalf of a paranoid government wanting a robust, distributed network for communications between military positions in the event of a global nuclear holocaust. What they got, however was something altogether greater than that. They got a virtual world in which the cost of replicating information was negligible; a world where any device that spoke the standard dialect of TCP/IP could take and place calls to anywhere the network went. Almost by accident, the software developers, largely university students and researchers, found their equivalent to scientific conferences, where new ideas could be presented and discussed. In the case of software, however, one did not need to stand at a podium to exchange ideas. No, it was done by exchanging source code.

To the disbelief (and subsequently horror) of the entrenched corporate software giants, whose huge and ever increasing stock values built on closed standards and vendor lock-in made them the darlings of Wall Street, ordinary, everyday people, who also happened to be very bright, started building very good software and distributing it freely via the Internet. What happened was a bunch of regular people were writing software within businesses or institutions that weren't in the business of selling software. These developers realised that if they wrote software and let others see it they could exchange ideas and get assistance with software related problems all the while achieving mutual benefits by borrowing from each others' expertise and source code. This helped them tune the performance and capabilities of internal systems which in turn made their companies core business more profitable. This exchange between software developers took place through public access electronic bulletin boards, email lists, and Usenet "news groups."

Using these newly emerging communications channels was seemless (they could interact with their peers online while they were writing code), and it was cheap. Some particularly useful software projects started to take on lives of their own: Eric Allman's Sendmail mail transfer agent (MTA) developed at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, Paul Vixie's Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND), and Rob McCool's HTTPd, the original web server, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. All of these people would have also been familiar with free development tools Richard Stallman's legendary Emacs programmer's editor and GCC compiler, used by many programmers as fundamental parts of their development infrastructure... because they were free, and also happened to be extremely good.

These and other similar software projects produced what are now the engines powering the Internet. Individuals like Tim Berners-Lee wrote papers describing, in full detail, the mechanics behind his "World Wide Web" idea, thereby creating an open standard similar to the mulitudes of IEEE standards used throughout the business and engineering worlds. Tim was also one of the founding members of the World Wide Web Consortium whose purpose was to keep the standards govering the Internet vendor neutral - to keep commercial interests from hijacking the standards development process, where the only considerations should be technical rather than commercial. If it wasn't for the steadfast refusal of Berners-Lee and other champions of open standards to cave in to commercial domination of the standards process - creating closed standards controlled by only one company - the Internet would never have been achievable.

But the Internet does exist, and it has proven its robustness. Despite all efforts of the worlds largest companies to stifle its openness, the communities surrounding free software have not only survived, they have flourished. Although some of the high profile companies who have tried to build businesses around open source software in an attempt to vy with the big closed source corporates have failed spectacularly, many of the smaller, faster, more agile ones have thrived quietly, as mammals did among the dinosaurs just before their extinction... For evidence of this, one need only survey the activity on one of the open source world's greatest assets, SourceForge created by VA Linux Systems before they, too, succumbed to the blight of the open-source-company-emulating-a-corporate, rebranding as the more ideologically ambiguous VA Software. Luckily, SourceForge has survived the throes of business. The sheer number of projects, managed voluntarily by software developers at non-software focused companies and institutions, or in the smaller more agile open source focused companies mentioned previously, and the rate at which that number is growing, is a testament to the turning tide and the growing momentum behind the global open source movement.

More to come... stay tuned.