Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond.
Robert Young is a businessman who is best known for founding Red Hat Inc., the open source software company. He owns the franchises for Forge FC of the Canadian Premier League as well as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League for which he is self-styled caretaker of the team.
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about those experiences in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git.
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and CentOS Stream serve as its upstream sources. All of Red Hat's official support and training, together with the Red Hat Certification Program, focuses on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.
Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He is known in the free software movement due to his work on HAL, GNOME, Metacity, GConf, and D-Bus.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries—most of which are provided by third parties—to create a complete operating system, designed as a clone of Unix and released under the copyleft GPL license.
OpenJDK is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition. It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006, four years before the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation. The implementation is licensed under the GNU General Public License 2 with a linking exception, preventing components that linked to the Java Class Library becoming subject to the terms of the GPL license. OpenJDK is the official reference implementation of Java SE since version 7, and is the most popular distribution of the JDK.
The history of free and open-source software begins at the advent of computer software in the early half of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code—the human-readable form of software—was generally distributed with the software, providing the ability to fix bugs or add new functions. Universities were early adopters of computing technology. Many of the modifications developed by universities were openly shared, in keeping with the academic principles of sharing knowledge, and organizations sprung up to facilitate sharing.
Opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. In response, various mechanisms have been tried to defuse the perceived problem.
Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project. It contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. It is now the upstream source for CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.
RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a free and open-source package management system. The name RPM refers to the .rpm file format and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primarily for Linux distributions; the file format is the baseline package format of the Linux Standard Base.
International Business Machines Corporation, nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
Mark Bolzern is one of the original pioneers of both the Internet, and of the Linux computer operating system. Bolzern was the founder of early Linux-specific community portals such as LinuxNews, LinuxMall, LinuxPro, LinuxGuru and PenguinPower. Bolzern was also the creator of the original plush Tux mascot, based on the original drawing by Larry Ewing. His work at LinuxMall allowed Bolzern to directly affect the Linux community with LinuxMall's support of various Linux events. His achievements play a significant role in the story of the book Rebel Code by author Glyn Moody
Pristine Sources is a software management concept coined by the developers of the short-lived Bogus Linux distribution and popularized by Marc Ewing, co-founder of Red Hat Inc, after he adopted it and RPM Package Manager as a development philosophy for Red Hat Linux. It was the concept that enabled Red Hat to build Linux distributions faster and more reliably than had been possible previously. Briefly, the problem with building an operating system out of the myriad pieces of open source components available from teams across the Internet was that there were many of these components and they all upgraded on different schedules at different times. Ewing's insight was to recognize that he could not take responsibility for these components. He and Erik Troan, wanted to build a software package management system, RPM, that allowed the team at Red Hat to avoid changing any of the source code of the software components they needed to use to build their Red Hat Linux operating system.
GNOME 1 is the first major release of the GNOME desktop environment. Its primary goal was to provide a consistent user-friendly environment in conjunction with the X Window System. It was also a modern and free and open source software alternative to older desktop environments such as the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), but also to the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Each desktop environment was built-upon then proprietary-licensed widget toolkits, whereas GNOME's goal from the onset, was to be freely-licensed, and utilize the GTK toolkit instead.
