Open Source - Foundations Of Innovation

Introduction

Open source is a hidden wonder of the tech industry, that is moving into the light a lot more in the last 10 years. From Linus Torvalds producing the fully customisable operating system Linux to AI agent models and OpenClaw.

In this article, we are going to discuss the key milestones of opensource since 1983, and find out how much impact it has on the biggest companies in the world.

[!note]
Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon (most top 500 companies) create and rely on open source.

What is Open Source? And where did it come from?

In short, open source refers to software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.

Open source wasn't originally called "open source", instead it was a rebrand of the concept originally created by Richard Stallman called "Free Software". Stallman being a great believer in the ideals of free software movements, and most notably pioneered the right to use, modify and distribute free software; such as the GNU General Public License (GPL - the biggest free software license).
By the late 1990s some developers including; Eric S. Raymond(Traditional "cathedral/Bazaar" model) Bruce Perens (Open Source Definition Book), Christine Peterson (co-founder of Foresight Institute) and other advocates, began calling this collaborative approach “open source” to avoid that "FREE" label that may have deterred business opportunities.

The History of Open Source

Notable milestones in the open source/free software movement include:

• 1969: Unix is created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Creators of the C language) at AT&T’s Bell Labs. Unix’s source code was initially distributed to universities, seeding an ethos of shared software.
• 1983: Stallman announces the GNU Project, and begins the modern free software movement.
• 1985: Stallman founds the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and publishes the GNU General Public License (GPL),
• 1991: Linux kernel is first released by Linus Torvalds under a free license. Combined with GNU tools, this creates a complete free OS (often called “Linux” or GNU/Linux). This marks the first widely successful free operating system.
• 1995: The Apache HTTP Server (originating from a patching group for NCSA httpd) becomes the dominant web server. (The Apache Software Foundation forms in 1999 to support Apache projects.)
• 1991-1995: Other major projects appear: Python (van Rossum, 1991), PHP (Lerdorf, 1995), Ruby (Matsumoto, 1995), MySQL (Widenius, 1995) GCC, Perl, Perl’s module CPAN, TCL/Tk, X Window System, and many more. These rapidly build a free software ecosystem.
• 1998: Netscape open-sources its Netscape Communicator browser, later becoming Mozilla/Firefox (Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross), and the term “open source” is coined in a brainstorming session by Christine Peterson et al. earlier that year.
• 1998 (Feb): Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond found the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to promote open-source licensing.
• 2003-04: The Mozilla Firefox browser becomes a popular open-source alternative to Internet Explorer. Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical releases Ubuntu (Debian-based Linux distro) in 2004, improving ease of use.
• 2005: Linus Torvalds creates Git, a distributed version control system, for Linux kernel development. Git rapidly becomes the world’s most popular version control (especially after GitHub’s rise). Linus later credits more to it's modern developers like Junio Hamano.
• 2006-10s: Major tech companies embrace OSS. Google open-sources Android (2008) and Chromium browser. The OpenStack cloud platform is launched (2010). Facebook releases React and GraphQL (JavaScript frameworks) as open source. Google open-sources Kubernetes in 2014 (building on Google’s internal Borg system). Major new OSS languages (Go, Rust, Swift) appear. Cloud-native projects (Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, etc.) surge.

Find the full timeline of free and open-source software here

Open Source in Silicon Valley

It's clear based on the timeline above open source software became more and more integrated with big tech business as we moved into the 2000s. Key companies that were apart of this embrace are as follows:

• Google (Alphabet): Google’s core products and infrastructure rely heavily on open source Software. Android (the world’s most popular mobile OS) is an open-source, Linux-based stack. Chromium, the open part of Google Chrome is open source also.
• Microsoft: Once a critic of “Free Software”, is now one of the largest OSS contributors. It open-sourced key tools (Visual Studio Code (under an MIT license in 2015), .NET Core, PowerShell, etc.) and acquired GitHub (2018).
• Amazon (AWS): AWS asserts it is “the best place to build and run open source software”, builds services around open-source engines (Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc.) and gives back significant resources to those communities.
• Meta (Facebook): Meta develops and open-sources many of its infrastructure and developer tools. Notably, Facebook created the React JavaScript library (used by millions of websites). A lot of Meta's Llama AI models are also open source.

There are many more big companies including Apple that also both contribute and rely of open source solutions.

[!info]
A 2024 estimate of the value of open-source software to firms is $8.8 trillion, as firms would need to spend 3.5 times the amount they currently do without the use of open source software.

• The Value of Open Source Software

To Conclude

Open source is great!
Facebook prototypes and original versions were written by Mark Zuckerberg using the OPEN SOURCE language PHP, meaning without open source, we never would have had Facebook, a titan in modern technology.

Large projects are no longer built in isolation by single companies. Instead, distributed teams share code and best practices. This has made software development more agile, collaborative, and community-oriented.

Open source is and will continue to be a solid foundation of software technologies, so next time you use your favourite software, remember how it probably came to be; thanks to generous and genius developer communities.

I'll be writing an article on the current state of open source (2026) so stay tuned for that!