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I have researched and written extensively about the history of the open source software (OSS) movement and its long-time relation to the IT Top 12: Apple, CA, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Sun. (Note: writing and researching about the investment potential of the IT Top 12 is my day job--see the link in the panel to the right of this article). OSS history goes back to the beginnings of the information technology (IT) market, predating by decades all the buzz these days about Red Hat, Linux, Mozilla and so forth.

That is, OSS litterally predates Linus if not Richard Stallman. I am 60--it does not quite predate me. But I was more interested in Ted Williams than Vannevar Bush when OSS started. (For those of you too young to understand the people references, Williams played ball on one side of the Charles River at a place called Fenway Park while Bush played ball on the other side in Kendall Square, Cambridge, at a place called Tech.)

For anyone interested in the historical background of OSS I recommend this 1999 paper by Nathan Newman as well as my own free articles on the subject, here and here. (Note that my first referenced article is actually about all IT market legal history and touches on OSS tangentially because of all the legal wrangling about OSS, which continues up to the present day.)

I found Newman's article quite a while after my original research but I find it both interesting and complementary to my own research. He takes a California 101 view to my Route 128 biases. He points more to Project MAC's relationship to UNIX, whereas I concentrate on MACs major offspring, Multics. (Of course, Unix begot Linux; less well known--Multics begot DEC VMS, which begot Windows NT). Newman traces the educational roots whereas I trace the commercial roots. He has a lot of good stuff on browsers, which I have always dismissively considered about as interesting as the Screen Division of a COBOL program. Newman's document predates mine by 6 years so some of his conclusions are now dated. (In my defense, I wasn't studying OSS back in 1999; I like to think we would have reached similar conclusions had we been working contemporaneously.)

Newman's document is on what now appears to be totally an archive site of a group called NetAction, a laid-back California cross between the Boston based badvista.org and groklaw.net. I can't find any entries after 2003. Nathan is a progressive blogger that gives a whole new meaning to the word prolific.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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Tracked on March 28, 2007 12:48 PM