{"id":10331,"date":"2018-09-11T12:27:23","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T16:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=10331"},"modified":"2019-01-11T00:02:40","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T05:02:40","slug":"a-somewhat-brief-history-of-open-source-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/labs\/a-somewhat-brief-history-of-open-source-software\/","title":{"rendered":"A Somewhat Brief History of Open-Source Software"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Open-source software has become a counter to corporate forces that institute consumer-negative practices (such as Apple’s walled garden) in an effort to raise profits for shareholders. As open-source software, tools, and other technologies rise in popularity and ease of use, it’s important to understand how open-source arrived at it’s current place, and why. This timeline<\/a>, created using the open-source Timeline.JS by Knight Lab<\/a>, takes a look at some of the major milestones in the evolution of open-source software and the movements that power its creation.<\/p>\n

My interest in open-source software comes from my background working as a cartographer. I’ve very rarely used ESRI (the preeminent GIS software provider) products, instead opting for Quantum GIS<\/a> (QGIS), a pure open-source, complete GIS suite.<\/p>\n

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Credit: Zachary Walker<\/p><\/div>\n

QGIS’s open nature allows for the community of users to build tools, plugins, and other code-based toys for the software, creating a free GIS program and support tools that competes on all levels with the corporate players. The power and flexibility of QGIS shows us how important open-source software can be in democratizing tools and educational opportunities (imagine you’re a GIS student, free is way better than expensive). Considering my relationship with QGIS, I felt I should dig into history of open-source and explore how we got to today.<\/p>\n

In researching the history of open-source software, I was struck by how vast and deep the history is.\u00a0 Making decisions on what to include in a 10-slide timeline was an exercise in assigning weight to events as an outside observer. Copyright law and Richard Stallman<\/a> were obvious choices as being the opposing forces and catalysts that lead to the creation of the Free Software Foundation<\/a>, a non-profit organization founded by Stallman to promote free and open-source software. Linux<\/a> (and it’s derivatives like Android) was also a must-have, but corporate investment in open-source tools (amongst lots of other topics) got left out to save space in exchange for a focus on released tools that are in common usage, like Git<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Linux OS. Credit: IJ Tech<\/p><\/div>\n

Open-source software still faces challenges that limit adoption in some ways. Corporate headwinds and technological complexity contribute to the non-tech savvy’s lack of knowledge in the sphere of open-source software. Open-source tools managed by large corporate entities, like Android, help to break down these walls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Open-source software has become a counter to corporate forces that institute consumer-negative practices (such as Apple’s walled garden) in an effort to raise profits for shareholders. As open-source software, tools, and other technologies rise in popularity and ease of use, it’s important to understand how open-source arrived at it’s current place, and why. This timeline,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":544,"featured_media":10332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,339],"tags":[240,191,239,186,241,189,120],"coauthors":[326],"class_list":["post-10331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-labs","category-timelines","tag-linux","tag-open-data","tag-open-source","tag-qgis","tag-richard-stallman","tag-timeline","tag-timelinejs-visualization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-11-at-10.41.18-AM.png?fit=1124%2C468&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paBdcV-2GD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10331"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10350,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10331\/revisions\/10350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10331"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}