United States: The Truths and Myths of Open Source Software
Requires registration, but here is a snippet:
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| "In the 1960s and 1970s source code was passed between a close knit
| community of programmers at the pre-eminent computer science institutions
| in the United States, such as MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley.
| Programmers expected that any improvements made to code would be published
| to the entire community. The movement did not gain widespread publicity
| until 1998 when Netscape, in an effort to ensure Microsoft's dominance
| would not erode open internet web protocols, released the source code to
| its web browser, Netscape Navigator. Following this announcement, theO
| pen Source Initiative was founded to improve the marketing and
| distribution of the free software community. Vendors, such as Oracle
| and IBM, began to announce their support of the open source operating
| system Linux.
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http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=40128
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