Open-Source

Some, including MIT scientist Richard Stallman, yearned for the return of those happier times and the mutual cooperation of programmers that existed when Unix was not commercial. So in 1983, Stallman launched the GNU (GNU's not Unix) project, which aimed at creating a free Unix-like operating system. Like early Unix, the GNU operating was to be distributed in source form so that programmers could read, modify, and redistribute it without restriction. Stallman's work at MIT had taught him that by using the Internet as a means of communication, programmers the world over could improve and adapt software at incredible speed, far out pacing the fastest rate possible using traditional software development models, in which few programmers actually see one another source code. [7, McCarty,1999]