The Legacy of Open Source Movement

In the late 90s and 00s, I remember it was a big deal to choose proper license upon release of your source code. I remember talking hours and hours with friends an colleagues, discussing why GNU Public License (GPL) is viral, the benefit of using Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) and the freedom offered by the BSD (n-clause) license. I also remember talks about the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and how important its role was back in the day. But are all these relevant now?

The true pioneer of the Open Source

I strongly believe that the many people had contributions spreading the philosophy behind open source, but the true champion was Linus Torvalds. Why?

First, he was (and is) the engineer behind the Linux kernel, which was the flagship OS that everyone used back in the day, to feel the power of unix and its open-source flavor. The FSF if I remember correctly, was trying to create GNU Hurd, without any success, adoption-wise at least. To be frank, in my university days, it was referred as a joke (sad).

Second, the git. It is now considered the de-facto standard version control system. Actually, it created a whole ecosystem of services (like Github), applications (like source tree) and methodologies for software development (like the git flow) that changed forever the way computer programs are created. Also, concepts like Pull Requests (PR) and Fork were also invented, making even the smallest changes and contributions a day-to-day activity for many engineers around the globe.

In Golang, you can import github repositories as packages directly.

So, it was not about politics

The naked truth, who is looking the license of a golang dependency, when imported into the code base? Almost noone, everything that is on github more or less is considered free-to-use. I am pretty sure that in several companies, they check these things, but you can find as an open source project almost everything. And you can easily download it, modify it and suggest an improvement or even clone it, with a single click of a button.

And licensing, is important and provide the legal foundation of things, but it is not really the case anymore. It was like, computer programs always needed to be open source, but there wasn’t due to lack of the proper technologies, not legislation.