SciSchool.in

• A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953

• TeX (developed by Donald Knuth) and SPICE

• In the early 1980s, AT&T stopped the free distribution of Unix

• Around 1980, computer vendors and software-only companies began routinely charging for software licenses

• The Story of the Open Letter by Bill gates

• The GNU Project, by Richard Stallman. Free as in freedom

• GNU General Public License, defines four levels of software freedom

• Free Software Foundation

• Progress of GNU. Arrival of Linux Kernel. Linus Torvalds

• **Version 1.0 of Linux was released in March-1994, initially only for the computer enthusiasts.

• 1997, Open Source movement, by Eric S. Raymond who published “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”

• Software from different teams. Advent of Distributions

• Slackware

• Redhat(https://www.redhat.com/en), the first corporate distro

• Debian, from a community of people.

• Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu distribution

• Kite, Kerala largest deployment of free and open source software (FOSS) in schools in the world

• Apache, Python, Samba, Mozilla, Postgresql, MySQL, PHP Free Software is available for almost everything

• Forces against Free/Open Source software

• World Wide Web Started at CERN. The first browser program Mosaic from NCSA, followed by Netscape Navigator that was killed by another firm. Code is now part of Firefox browser.

Present Scenario

Even though GNU/Linux is used at school level, colleges are still using propriatory software. main reason is NOT providing the installer media even after taking the money for the operating system. With preinstalled sytems, most of the users including computer science students don’t attempt to do an OS installation.

Installation os development tools are very easy under GNU/Linux and are more reliable.

Most of the Servers on the Internet runs on GNU/Linux. If you want to setup a server from scratch, knowing GNU/Linux is essential.

My experience with Free Software.

• Started using Slackware in Feb-1994, Linux .99

• Distributed control system developed in 1995. Around 15 to 20 computers running a server program are connected to the devices to be controlled. Client computers provide user interface. Servers run non-stop for several years. Now completing nearly 30 years.

• High speed data acquisition systems for physics experiments.

• Programming micro-controllers, using GNU C compiler.

• ExpEYES