- 1969-70 Development of the Unix operating system begins
at AT&T's Bell Laboratories.
Emacs period
- 1971 Stallman joins the Artificial Intelligence Lab
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His job is to improve a computer operating system called ITS —Incompatible
Time-Sharing System.
- 1974 Stallman got a magna cum laude degree in physics in Harvard (1970
to 1974).
- 1975 Cons Lisp machine was created by Greenblatt
- 1975 Emacs for Cons
- 1977 Symbilocs was formed
- 1979 Grennblatt left Symbolics over disagreements with Noftsker and
forms LMI
- 1982-1983 Stallman helps LMI in its fight with Symbolics by reverse
engineering Symbolics OS and put enhancements into LMI OS
Start of GNU project
- 1983 Stallman resigns from MIT to start the GNU project
to write a free, Unix-like operating system. The name stands for GNU
is Not Unix.
- 1984 Steven Levy "Hackers"
book is published with a chapter devoted to RMS that presented
him in an extremely favorable light.
- 1984 Stallman published a rewritten version of Emacs
(GNU Emacs) as "free" software, and launches the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) to support the GNU project. One of the first program he decided
to write is a C compiler that became widely knows as gcc.
GCC period
- 1985 The first version of GCC was able to compile itself.
- 1985 GNU Manifesto published
GPL period
- 1989 FSF introduces a
General Public License (GPL). GPL is also known as '
copyleft'.
- 1990 As the president of the
League for Programming Freedom (organization that fight
software patterns), Stallman is given a $240,000 fellowship by the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
- 1991 ACM Grace Hopper Award for developing Emacs.
- 1991 Linus Torvalds started his development of Linux kernel.
- 1992 XEmacs fork. The first blow against RMS Bonaparte tendencies.
- 1994 First official Linux version 1.0 kernel released.
Linux already has about 500,000 users. Hurd efforts became doomed.
Development stalled. Political activism period
- 1996 Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, awards
Stallman an honorary doctorate. Hurd is dead, XEmacs became more popular
that Emacs.
- 1997 GCC fork. Second and more serious blow to the idea of FSF
as the center of free software universe. FSF lost all its importance
as a development center for free software. It's no longer a primary GCC
maintainer, or XEmacs maintainer.
- 1997 Eric Raymond paper "The Cathedral and The Bazaar"
was delivered at the Linux Congress 97 conference. Reformist, slightly
anti-Stallman and anti-GNU open source movement was created. The term
open source software largely replaced the term free software.
- 1997 Jihad against KDE started.
- 1998 Netscape released the source code for Navigator
on controversial terms. The event that was used by Eric Raymond to publicize
an Open Source movement as distinct from GNU -- the movement that offers
a much friendlier face to the business world, than FSF with its Anarchist
view of intellectual property. .
- 1998 Stallman and Torvalds are given Pioneer awards by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Torvalds moved to the USA and gave in one
year more interviews that for the rest of his life. As a public speaker
he almost completely displaced RMS. Linux has approximately seven millions
users. Intel and Netscape invested in Red Hat. The fight for GNU/Linux
as a proper name of a combination of Linux kernel with GNU products is
over: RMS lost it and the standard name remained just Linux.
- 1999 The year of Linux IPOs. Red Hat IPO produced
first Linux millionaires like Robert Yong, Linus Torvalds, "surprised
by wealth" Eric Raymond, and several others. RMS declined RH stock offering.
- 2000 GNU project converts into almost purely
political organization without any significant development activities.
Donation of SUN StarOffice to GPL became the largest GPLed project in
history. It also eliminated weaker volunteer efforts to create a free
alternative of MS Office. Radicalization of the RMS agenda. RMS critique
of LGPL as inferior to GPL license. Final stage of the jihad against
KDE. Transmeta IPO signaled the end of Linux IPO wave. Linus Torvalds
got an "undisclosed amount" of Transmeta stock. Jihad against KDE
ended by Qt adopting a GPL license. Gnome was adopted by Sun and other
big Unix players as a new Unix standard desktop environment. Caldera
acquired SCO Unix that became the first victim of Linux among proprietary
Unix brands.
- 2001 The slide of stock market hurt Linux companies and
almost eliminated prev. year "mass Linux enthusiasm" among investors.
VA Linux and Transmeta lost their CEOs. Microsoft vice president Allchin
pointed out that government sponsored software cannot be released under
GPL and that GPL might stifle innovation. The draft of GPL v3 was released.
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