Happy birthday, Open Source - you're legal now
18 years ago today, 386BSD's version 0.1 was released, ushering in a new era in development. Tip back a pint of open source beer, why don't you?
By Amy Vernon on Wed, 07/14/10 - 12:52pm.Today is a landmark in open source history, the unofficial birthday of the movement. On this day, in 1992, version 0.1 of 386BSD (you might know it as Jolix) was released.
Now, some might say March was the true birthdate, as that was the original release of 386BSD, version 0.0. Others point to Unix as laying the true foundation for Linux, which many credit for truly launching the open source revolution.
But it wasn't until the second, more usable, 386BSD release that users began developing unofficial patchkits for to fix bugs and enhance aspects of the system. And that, more than anything else is the true core of what open source is. It still lives today, having evolved into FreeBSD.
I've written before about the different definitions people have for open source. It can be a philosophy, a business model, a software model, a community, a license type.
What is common to all those different definitions, though, is the idea that people skilled enough to do so can fix things in the code themselves and contribute back to the greater community surrounding that operating system, middleware or software. Or they can take it upon themselves to enhance the product, creating apps to work with it or new features anyone can use.
The community is the major strength of open source - one that was, basically, born on this day, 18 years ago.
Hey - open source is old enough to serve in the military. It's legal to drive in every U.S. state. It's still not allowed to drink quite yet in the U.S., but elsewhere it's legal. It could vote if it just had a permanent address. It can buy porn. It could even get a tattoo (or any other Android phone, for that matter).
It's worth stepping back for a day to reflect on what today means in the history of open source. That open source software of some type or another would have evolved is highly likely. But whether it would have evolved in this manner, around a community - who knows?
In talking to anyone about open source software and systems, "community" keeps coming up over and over and over. Without this original community of developers creating and sharing patches on this freely distributed system, would community be at the root of all open source today?
Quite possibly. That doesn't mean it's not worth tipping your hat to 836BSD and William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz today.
Image via Lynne Jolitz.
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- About Pragmatic Source
After nearly 20 years as a professional journalist for large and small daily newspapers in Florida, Arizona and New York, Amy was part of the Great Newspaper Culling of 2008. That was a good thing. Now, Amy writes for a variety of websites, including NetworkWorld, Discovery's Parentables and Soshable and consults with a variety of sites on their social media strategy.
She also has created the first - and only - bacon news aggregator on the Internet, Bacon Queen and has altogether too many Tumblogs. Amy is the top female user of all time on Digg.com and spends altogether too much time on the computer. You can follow her on Twitter and find more out about her on her website.
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