History of Free Software

What we call today free software movement existed long before the free software materialized in free internet programs or free PC software of any need and use. In 1950, 1960 an 1979 the free concept was based on norm. The software was then distributed to the community of users and the hardware manufacturers were happy that someone was writing programs to put in function their products. At that time there were organizations such as Share, whose main purpose was the distribution of free software on a large scale. All this changed in time with the increase of the total costs of producing software. In 1970 appeared the first measures that restricted the free distribution of programs and software, such as distributing software in binary format. Their purpose was to prevent a user to study and modify programs. In 1980 laws were extended to software producing.

In 1983, Richard Stallman of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory announced the GNU project. The evolution of GNU operation began in 1984 and in 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation. The GNU was designed in 1983 as a way of bringing the spirit of cooperation that prevailed in the computing community at its beginning which stand for actions in order to make cooperation possible once again by removing obstacles imposed by the owners of software properties. In 1971, when Richard Stallman started his career at MIT, he worked in a group which used free software exclusively. Programmers were then free to cooperate with each other and often did. In the '80s, almost all software was proprietary, meaning that it had owners who forbid and prevent cooperation by other users. This is why the GNU Project was born.

The economic viability of free software has been recognized by a wide range of companies like IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. Due to the low costs they provide, many companies have chosen free software sites for marketing concerns on the Internet sale business. Also, many industries have begun to use similar techniques to those used in the development of free software in development and research. For example, more hardware platforms and microchips are developed according to principles of free software, with specifications published in copyleft licenses such as OpenCore.