Survey of FOSS Project Origins

• Linux
  • Torvalds was a student, read Tanenbaum's book
  • Moved to the US,
• FreeBSD
  • derived from BSD source code (academic)
• NetBSD
  • derived from BSD source code (academic)
• OpenBSD
  • derived from BSD source code (academic)
  • OpenBSD of Theseus - no more unmodified files

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• C++
  • Bjarne was at Bell Labs
• GCC
  • GNU project / Free Software / Copyleft
• Clang/LLVM
  • Lattner was a grad student in compilers
  • Then developed LLVM at Apple for many years
• Rust
  • started by Mozilla, now Rust Foundation with corporate sponsors

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• Python
  • Guido was a research programmer in the Netherlands (Tanenbaum's lab)
  • Moved to the US, the US defense organization CNRI funded Python
  • Python funded by various corporations, including Google
• Ruby
  • Hobbyist Origins
• Perl
  • Hobbyist Origins
• PHP
  • Hobbyist Origins, then many hosting companies
• sqlite
  • Hipp started the project, formed a small corporation around it

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• Ruby on Rails
  • DHH started it and has maintained it, while also working on commercial SaaS

Servers:

• Redis
  • Hobbyist, then Redis Labs?
• Nginx
  • Hobbyist, then a company?
• Apache
  • ?

SCM

• git
  • Torvalds started it for Linux
• Subversion
  • CollabNet
• Mercurial

Editors

• Vim
  • Hobbyist, Donationware
• Emacs

Academic

• Lua
  • Academic Research sponsored by industry
• Postgres
  • a professor's commercial venture shut down?

Named after industrial monopolies:

• SBCL - Steel Bank Common Lisp (CMU)
• SML - Standard ML of New Jersey (Princeton, NJ and Bell Labs in NJ)

Corporate

• Firefox
  • Mozilla
• Chromium (derived from Chrome)
  • Google
• AOSP (derived from Android)
  • Google

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• JVM
  • Sun
• Go
  • Google
• MySQL
  • ?

TODO

• X.org
  • Unix vendors wanted to commodotize Sun ?
• KDE
• GNOME
• Debian
  • Ian Murdock, Bruce Perens (Pixar?)
  • https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/project-history.en.txt