:: History of Open Source ::

• In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project to write a complete operating system free from constraints on use of its source code.

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• •In 1989, the first version of the GNU General Public License was published. A slightly updated version 2 was published in 1991. 

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• •In 1989, some GNU developers formed the company Cygnus Solutions.

• The Linux kernel, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. 

• •The BSD lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993, FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD

• KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich. At the time, he was troubled by the inconsistencies in UNIX applications. 

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• •In 1997, Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a reflective analysis of the hacker community and free software principles. The paper received significant attention in early 1998 and was one factor in motivating Netscape Communications Corporation to release their popular Netscape Communicator Internet suite as free software. This code is today better known as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

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• •In August 1999, Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice office suite as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The free software version was renamed OpenOffice.org, and coexists with StarOffice. 

---> Reference From ::

• http://static.userland.com/userLandDiscussArchive/msg019844.html