

Ask HN: What are the most important OSS projects of all time? - twog

Hi HN,<p>I was talking with some of my co-workers about how important OSS has been in advancing technology. I argued that without OSS, technology wouldnt be close to where it is today. Some of the projects I listed as being the most important were the following:<p>* Programming Languages - Php, Python, Ruby, etc. 
* Linux - the OS basis for nearly everything
* Android - powers a large percentage of the worlds smart phones
* Wordpress, Drupal, blogging platforms - Empowering peoples voice<p>What else am I missing? Any other threads I can read about this?
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hollerith
The Berkeley Software Distribution, first released in 1978, was a very
important early open-source project. The second version, released in 1979,
included the vi editor. When Sun Microsystems formed, they incorporated BSD
into their OS, SunOS. In fact, people on the internet have asserted that the
TCP/IP stack for most operating systems, including the first stack
incorporated into Linux and into Windows 95, was copied from BSD's stack.
Since sharing source code is an effective way to increase the chances that two
different systems will be able to interoperate on the internet, this TCP/IP
stack from BSD (whose creation was funded by the US government) probably
materially sped up the growth of the internet.

The original BSD license, which is quite close to the BSD license used by many
open-source project today, was created because the owners of BSD (the
University of California) believed BSD had to be placed in the public domain
because its creation was funded by the US government, and the US government is
prohibited by law from copyrighting its creations. Actually, they did not
release it into the public domain, but the license they chose is very close to
"public domain" in that the restrictions it imposes are very light.

Before 1993, _most_ of the software used for communication on the internet was
either explicitly open source (i.e., under the GPL or the BSD license) or
"informal open-source", meaning that it did not come with formal license
terms, but its source code was available, and it was widely believed that it
was unlikely that anyone would try to stop you if you modified it or
redistributed it.

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kjs3
BSD was encumbered by AT&T code & licenses and most definitely not open source
until something like 1992 and BSD4.4-Lite (which really begat the open source
*BSD releases) didn't come out until 1994.

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hollerith
Yes, and that does not contradict anything I wrote. Particularly, the BSD
license long predates 1992, and Sun Microsystems took advantage of that
license to sell computers in which BSD constituted a large fraction of the
software starting in 1982.

The fact that there was a decade or more of legal uncertainty over whether
AT&T could use the courts to stop the distribution of BSD by the University of
California certainly had an inhibitory effect, but never actually stopped the
distribution of BSD by the University, and did not prevent BSD's source code
from being redistributed freely or from being incorporated into most operating
systems capable of connecting to the internet even before the legal
uncertainty was resolved in the early 1990s.

~~~
kjs3
That's not how what you wrote read. You may have meant that a BSD license
existed in '82, but you implied the BSD modified Unix operating system was
generally open source long before it really was. The fact that many
manufactures secured separate licenses (for which they paid Berkeley a lot of
money) is irrelevant. The simple fact is that the truly "free" BSDs did not
exist before the early 90s and the resolution of the dispute between AT&T and
Berkeley. Full stop. End of story.

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jfaucett
GNU everyhing, just go to gnu.org, and remember that what we refer to as
"linux" is mainly the os kernel, most of the user space programs, libs etc.
are GNU projects.

~~~
kjs3
I'll get behind the toolchain (GCC, as, gdb, etc) as a game changer, but
"everyhing"? Please...other than GNU rewrites of BSD 4.3 userland programs
(not hard), most of the projects on gnu.org happened _after_ Linux became
ascendant if not dominant. And of the major pre-Linux projects, how many are
still indispensable? How about the colossal waste of resources behind GNU
Emacs? GNU could have recreated Genera, and done it better, and really changed
the world for all that went into it and it did nothing more than create a
fetish for a tiny and declining group of people. We don't even need to go to
Hurd; it's punchline to a software project joke right there with Duke Nukem.

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kjs3
The GNU development toolchain (GCC, etc). Without a solid, free, complete,
self hosting development environment, literally nothing else you mention would
exist.

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byoung2
I think jQuery should be on the list...it has had a big impact on front-end
programming, and it powers over half of the top 10000 sites.

