Introduction

The free and open source software movements have a long history which stretches back to the very earliest days of computing. "New" history is being written nowadays at a furious pace as open source software is ever more widely adopted by businesses and organisations.

While it may not be essential to you as a manager to fully know this history for you to be able to apply open source software in your organisation, having an understanding of the way that it has developed over time will give you a better understanding of why the software works the way it does and some of the "political" issues which underlie the technology and affect its community groups.

This history is written as a time line: there is no single thread to the history of open source. Instead it has developed organically and spontaneously in many places and at many times.