Some of the most important timelines of Open Source Software Movement, during last century :


1969 : First Version of UNIX



Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell labs, develops the first version of Unix. A multi-user, multitasking operating system, Unix becomes popular in universities and research labs, and its source code is distributed freely.

1971 : From 'Free' to 'Open'


Richard Stallman, a pioneer in the open source movement, joins an MIT group devoted exclusively to free software.

1979 : Emergence of the Open Software Foundation

AT&T announces plans to commercialize Unix, and in response, the University of California at Berkeley creates its own version of Unix, called BSD [Berkeley Software Distributions] Unix. BSD Unix is adopted by vendors such as DEC and Sun. AT&T and Sun later agree to merge their version of Unix, which prompts competitors [DEC, HP, and IBM] to form the Open Software Foundation.

1983 : GNU Project


Richard Stallman established the GNU project to promote the free software model, applications and programming tools. GNU establishes the General Public License [GPL], better known as copyleft, which becomes the model for many open source projects.

1986 : PERL created


Larry Wall creates PERL[Practical Extension and Report Language], a CGI [Common Gateway Interface] scripting language, which is one of the standard means of delivering more dynamic content on the Web.

1987 : Minix is distributed with code


Developer Andrew Tanenbaum released Minix, a version of Unix for the PC, Mac, Amiga and Atari ST. It comes with complete source code.

1989 : Linux Born


Aiming to exceed the capabilities of Minix, a student at the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds, releases a new Unix variant, Linux. Three years later, Torvalds copylefts Linux.

1993 : FreeBSD


FreeBSD 1.0 is released, based on BSD UNIX, Free BSF includes networking, virtual memory, task switching and large filenames.

1994 : Linux goes Mainstream

Marc Ewing forms Red Hat Linux with an aim to simplify Linux usage. Red Hat Packages Linux with third-party applications, documentation, and initial technical support and starts sells their version. Same year, Bryan Sparks founds Caldera with backing by former Novell CEO Ray Noorda.

1995 : A Patchy Server


The Apache Group builds a new Web Server, Apache based on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications [NCSA's] HTTPd 1.3 and a series of patch files. The free Web server becomes one of he most popular HTTP servers.

1998 : OSS Revolution



Netscape announces it will not only give away Communicator 5.0 but will also release its source code.



Corel Computer Corporation announces Netwinder, an inexpensive network computer that uses Linux as its production OS. This is the first major, conscious adoption of what is called the widget-frosting model by an established business outfit. Corel also announces planes to port WordPerfect and its other office software to Linux.



Sun Microsystems makes Solaris available under a free license to individual users, also to educational/non-profit/research institutions.



IBM announces that it will sell and support Apache as part of its WebSphere shite. The trade press hails this as a breakthrough for Open Source software.



Oracle and Informix announced that the will port their database to Linux.


Steve Ballmer, Microsoft President admits, " Sure, we're worried about Apache and Linux", and says Microsoft is considering disclosing more Windows source.

Any other important timeline of Open Source Software sagas, I have left ?