Before this paper starts in earnest, a brief history of software development will be discussed. This is important, as many people are under the impression that this young industry has always been run the way it is presently. Quite the contrary in fact. A wonderful history that conveys a great sense of the atmosphere of early computing has been written by McKusick (Open Sources 1999:31)
When computer science was new, software was seen as a necessary cost of building and selling hardware. A vendor would design and build both the hardware and software and ship with complete source code. This practice continued for many years until, after many decades of computer evolution, the PC emerged.
The PC was small, technically inferior, and relatively cheap to buy. It was also an open specification. Another product of the PC age was the notion of software being separate from the hardware. This eventually led to practice of selling expensive binary-only software.
No longer were users allowed to pass their software around to one another, and without the source code, users could no longer improve the software (Stallman 1992). While passing source around was still quite prevalent in academic circles, the increasingly protective attitude of the commercial software vendors lead academics like Richard Stallman to begin the Free Software Foundation whose goal was to make software free again. Open Source has developed from this ideal.