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If you’re like me, you became fully aware of free and open source software only gradually, rather than suddenly and all at once. Either way, you may sometimes wonder what you still don't know about where FOSS came from, how it happened, and why it matters. That's the way I felt, too, so I decided to fill in the blanks for myself.
Over the past few months, I’ve been reading several books on the origins of FOSS, each based upon extensive interviews with those that made FOSS happen. That’s been especially revealing, because in recent years I’ve gotten to know many of the same individuals, and didn’t always fully appreciate the roles that they had played in the early days of FOSS.
Recently, I tried to recount the origins of FOSS in the context of all of the other things that were going on at the same time in technology in a single article. While no single article could ever hope to fully capture such a complex topic, perhaps the concise overview that I’ve put together can fill in some of the blanks even for people who have a pretty good idea of what FOSS is all about. And hopefully it will also provide the incentive for them to want to learn more.
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