Talk:History of free software

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[edit] References sought

We'll need references for this, so if you know of books and essays that are available that document the history of free software, particularly in the 70s and 80s, please add those links here or to the "External links" section. Links about the 60s and 90s are also sought, but are probably less important because less happened in the 60s, and links about the 90s are easy to find. Gronky 23:00, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I find that a targeted google book search is often a goldmine for sourcing. Once you find sources there you can use {{cite book}} for the article's inline citations.--Fuhghettaboutit 23:33, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] References

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.112.116.206 (talk) 03:29, 6 March 2007 (UTC).

An important part of the history of Free software is reflected in Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software and this Book has some useful information inside - starting this this chapter. Perhaps someone with the time can elaborate the article using these sources and then reference them? Kim 15:02, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
That Salon.com book is interesting. This is the first time I've read (bits of) it. It's a pity about the click-through ad and that some of the links are broken. That makes it a bad candidate for the External links section, but it's still a good reference for us editors. --Gronky (talk) 08:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Debian

There isn't a single mention of Debian in the entire current text. *gasp* --Joy [shallot] 22:26, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Circumstance hereby elects you to make that edit. No gasping required, Debian should be mentioned. Gronky 07:29, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Odd information

I cannot see how "Early versions of UNIX", can be free software and not free software in the text below:

Software was produced largely by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration and was not itself seen as a commodity. Operating systems, such as early versions of UNIX, were widely distributed and maintained by the community of users. Source code, the human-readable version of software, was distributed with software because users frequently modified the software themselves to fix bugs, or add new functionality. Thus in this era, software was principally free software, not because of any concerted effort by software users or developers, but rather because software was developed by the user community.

Early versions of UNIX were distributed at no cost, however, these versions did not come with permission to redistribute or to distribute modified versions, and were thus not free software.

[edit] Another source for sources

Here are some other pages which might yield useful references:

Hope those are useful. Gronky 10:06, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Free software laws (2000-)

It would be great to have this section completed with the history of the laws proposed in other countries. See this page for useful references: http://www.proposicion.org.ar/doc/gob/index.html.en. It doesn't matter if the laws were not implemented, the reasons for the law to be rejected are also interesting. --elopio (talk) 20:07, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

That info is currently in the free software movement article. --Gronky (talk) 08:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with History of Open Source?

Shouldn't History of Open Source be merged with this article? Azrael Nightwalker (talk) 14:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

It looks like it should be renamed to "History of Unix", and some content should be moved into this article. What do you think? --Gronky (talk) 15:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
History of Unix currently redirects to the Unix article, which has a better history section. I think that useful stuff from this article should be merged to History of free software, Open source, Open source software, and Open Source Initiative and the article should be deleted afterwards since it duplicates much stuff. Azrael Nightwalker (talk) 22:10, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
I knew something looked strange. That article is a copy of a paper someone wrote: [1] User:Irayna claims to be the author of the paper and to allow it's inclusion. That may be acceptable, I'm not sure (since it's not verified). Since this paper is online elsewhere already, maybe the best thing to do would be to merge the content into existing articles (where there is indeed new info) and add a link to the paper from this article. --Gronky (talk) 23:35, 7 February 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Please add {{fact}} tags

This article needs references, but it's hard to see which statements need references and which are patently obvious. If you want to help, please add {{fact}} tags to the statements that need citations. Then I can find references to cite. Gronky 15:11, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the {{refimprove}} tag that was on this article. Without more specific indications, it's just too hard to know what parts need improved references. So I'll reiterate this call for people to add {{fact}} tags to anything they think needs it. I don't mind doing the work of finding the necessary references. --Gronky (talk) 08:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Books on the topic

I'd be interested to know what printed books are available on the history of free software. I've started a list with those that I know of. If anyone knows others, please add them to the list. Thanks. Gronky (talk)

You're lucky that I'm writing a thesis about Free Software, so I have gathered lots of resources for it. I've expanded your list with more books, most of them are available online. Azrael Nightwalker (talk) 12:53, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. And if you publish your thesis online, don't forget to add it to this article as an external link or a reference :-) --Gronky (talk) 13:35, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
Unfortunately my university requires me to wait 6 months before publishing my thesis, because they have the right to publish it first. Besides, my thesis is in Polish so I guess it won't be much use to you ;) Anyway, you can check out my blog [2] for more links to online books (the links are in english so you won't have problems with understanding). Azrael Nightwalker (talk) 14:18, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merge in history of Open Source

The article History of Open Source (previously titled "Open Source History"), was made in December 2006 by some one copy-and-pasting this paper: [14] into Wikipedia. The person, User:Irayna, claims to be the author of that paper, so maybe this is ok from a copyright standpoint - or maybe not, we'd have to confirm somehow that User:Irayna really is the author, and really is the copyright holder.

But, either way, that paper is available online, and can be found from the External links section of this article. It's also worth noting that the right WikiMedia service for mirroring freely distributeable texts is WikiSource.

Not much has changed in that article since it was pasted in in December 2006, so there is not much original content to be merged. At a glance, the only original content is about Unix (not actually about open source / free software anyway), plus a sentence about a project by some people in the Netherlands to make an "open-source car". I'll have to look into that one. --Gronky (talk) 12:51, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Merged. I didn't find any original content that could be added to this article, so the merge consisted of making History of Open Source a redirect here. Here are the edits that were made to the article between when the above-mentioned paper was pasted in and when I added the merge tag: [15]. Maybe someone else will see something that I missed that is worth integrating here. --Gronky (talk) 11:30, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Beware of assuming open source is the same as free software. I don't think the open source beer and open source car are for example not relevant to the History of Free Software but perhaps they could go somewhere else?--Darrelljon (talk) 12:40, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
The open source beer (whose name is "Free Beer") was inspired by the free software movement and was made as a way of explaining free software. This is explained on their website http://freebeer.org/blog/faq/
--Gronky (talk) 11:59, 26 March 2008 (UTC)