A Brief History of Open Source Software, Part 2: OSS Licenses and Legalities
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the magic of open source software (OSS) is based as much on legal innovation as it is on collaboration. Indeed, the essential innovation that launched free and open source software was not Richard Stallmans GNU Project, but his announcement of a revolutionary new licensing philosophy, and the actual license agreements needed to put that philosophy into effect. Only later did global collaboration among developers explode, riding the wave of Stallman's licenses, Linus Torvald's pioneering work in creating the distributed development process, and rapidly increasing telecommunications bandwidth.
In this installment, we'll explore how Stallman's philosophy spread and forked, and where it has taken us to today.
The legal theories, agreements, and documentation that relate to OSS, and its precursor, Free and Open Source Software (for convenience, in this installment I'll refer to both types collectively as FOSS), are far too complex to explore more than superficially in an article of this type. But for current purposes, it is less important to acquire a deep knowledge of FOSS legal terms than it is to gain insight into why the legalities of FOSS are so important.
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