Is open-source software a new thing?
No. open-source software has been around since the days of the early mainframe computers. In those days, software was freely exchanged with source code by researchers and academics. It used to be commonly called free software, and was typified by The Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. The Internet was built using free software and to this day it still depends a lot on it for its functioning. The term “open source” itself came about when, with the success of the Internet, the technical people tried to introduce good quality free software into their organisations and were met with disbelief by the management that anything which has no price-tag to it can be good and reliable. To try and overcome the negative sentiments about using non-commerical free software the term “open-source software” was coined.
