Proprietary Software vs. Open Source Software

When the concept of open source just appeared, it started a continued fight between the proponents of proprietary software and open source software advocates, which still goes no. Large market players such as Oracle and Microsoft considered open source as a threat to their proprietary IP and, in the bigger picture, their business model. Today many companies release proprietary software as well as open source projects, which has definitely regained its popularity in the late 90’s and early 00’s.

After Mozilla project was released by Netscape in 1998, a group of programmers lead by Eric Raymond gathered in Palo Alto to pick an alternative name for free software. After many discussions, Christine Peterson suggested the term ‘open source’. According to the activists, the profound difference between open source software and proprietary software was the availability of the source code to users.

In 1999, Red Hat and Linux showed tremendous growth, which lead to commonness and greater awareness of open source projects. Same year, IBM publicly announced its interest in Linux and invested $1 bln. in their future projects. In 2000, Microsystems developed OpenOffice.org and released the source code of its StarOffice Suite platform.

Massive investments from the industry giants such as IBM and Sun Microsystems have resulted in the rocket-fast adoption of open source in the current tech industry.

Source: https://medium.com/@opengift/software-is-meant-to-be-free-a-brief-history-of-open-source-3bb2364a5f82