In 1969, Unix was developed by a group of AT&T employees at Bell labs. As things progressed, Unix was developed and later splintered in to many different proprietary versions. In the mid to late 70's the microcomputer entered on the stage, and several different operating systems emerged on the new platforms. In 1981, IBM introduced the first IBM Personal Computer. The system was introduced with PC-DOS, CP/M-86 and UCSD p-System were also available. PC-DOS is a early Operating system derived from CP/M, which evolved into MS-DOS. All of these systems are/were proprietary in nature. Most of the systems noted above have subsequently been replaced by the current dominating commercial operating system, Microsoft Windows. In my working career, I have encountered something like 16 different versions of Windows.
In 1984 the GNU Project was launched to develop a Unix-like operation system that is free software, the GNU system. In 1991 Linus Torvalds initiated the development of the Linux kernel. Which was subsequently combined with the GNU Project, which resulted in what we now know as Linux (aka: GNU/Linux). The primary support for the GNU Project is the Free Software Foundation which was founded in 1985 to promote the use of Free (as in Freedom) software. These free software projects are intended to counter the proprietary software world, where everything comes at a price with extremely detailed limitations on how, where, and for what you may use a computer.
What does open source mean the perspective of the end user? Amongst many other things, open source software(OSS) provides inexpensive (as in mostly free) software and operating systems that come with very few strings attached. You can do whatever you please with the software as long as you follow the appropriate open source license. The majority of which do not effectively impact on the end user. By the very nature of it's community based development model, OSS tends to be more secure, less resource intensive, and more responsive to the needs of the end user. The current Linux distributions are not plagued by viri, and malware to the extent that proprietary operating systems are. There are currently several populare Linux distributions to choose from. In the past it was fairly difficult to install software such as Linux, but in the current form this is usually not a problem.
There are, however, several apparent dis-advantages to modern OSS. The first of all being that you must have the technical know how to take advantage of OSS. Typically, the software is obtained via download from the Internet, or may be purchased from web sites, book stores, or (some) software retailers. Unless you know someone that is using OSS, you will need to rely on Internet resources, such as developers web sites, special interest groups, web forums, and search engines for support. Driver support is sometimes difficult to obtain, particularly on very recent hardware. (Although this has gotten much better in recent years.) Finally, though there are equivalent application for almost any need, it is not a trivial matter to run Windows applications under open source operating systems.
03/28/08