*[open-source.sgit.ai](/index.md) · site v0.2.2 · canonical: https://open-source.sgit.ai/history/timeline.html* > A sourced timeline of open source from the 1956 AT&T consent decree to the relicensing wave and its partial reversals — placed behind the corrections rather than in front of them, because the corrections are the part worth reading first. --- # The timeline, 1955 → 2026 Deliberately the second page in this section rather than the first. [The six corrections lead](index.md), because a timeline is a shape everyone already has and the corrections are the part that changes what you think. This is the supporting material — with a column for what each moment is *evidence of*, since a date on its own argues nothing. ## Before there was a name (1955–1991) | When | What happened | What it is evidence of | |---|---|---| | **1955–56** | SHARE, the IBM user group, forms and circulates code between installations. The **AT&T consent decree** (1956) bars Bell Labs from any business but common-carrier communications. | Sharing preceded ideology. The decree is the structural fact that made the next twenty-five years possible. | | **1969–1975** | Unix is written at Bell Labs and distributed to universities **for media and postage** — the only lawful channel available. | [Correction 1.](index.md#unix) A compliance artefact, not a gift. | | **1977–1980s** | Berkeley builds BSD on top of it; the Berkeley licence emerges as the permissive model. | Permissive licensing predates the debate about it by a decade. | | **1982** | **The consent decree is lifted.** AT&T commercialises System V immediately. | The control experiment. Remove the constraint and the behaviour reverses within months. | | **1983–1991** | The GNU project begins (1983); the GPL formalises copyleft (1989, v2 1991); the FSF is founded (1985). | Copyleft as a deliberate legal invention — a licence designed to make a structural guarantee the BSD licence does not attempt. | | **1991** | **Linux 0.01.** Relicensed to GPLv2 in 1992. | Arrives at the exact moment the alternative becomes legally uncertain. | ## The window that decided it (1992–1998) | When | What happened | What it is evidence of | |---|---|---| | **Apr 1992 – Feb 1994** | **USL v. BSDi.** Free Unix is clouded by litigation for two years. The settlement removes **three files out of eighteen thousand** and adds copyright notices to about seventy. | [Correction 2.](index.md#bsd) Litigation risk, not licence design, is what moved adoption. | | **1995** | Apache httpd released; the Apache Group forms (Foundation, 1999). | The first large-scale demonstration of **neutral-foundation governance** — which is [leg two of the stress test](../survivability/stress-test.md#leg2), working, thirty years before anyone needed the test. | | **Feb 1998** | **Christine Peterson coins "open source"** and has Todd Anderson introduce it. OSI founded shortly after; the Open Source Definition published. | [Correction 4.](index.md#peterson) | | **22 Jan / 31 Mar 1998** | Netscape announces, then releases, the Communicator source. The code is so degraded the team eventually rewrites from scratch. | [Correction 3.](index.md#netscape) Opening a codebase is the start of the engineering, not the end. | ## The commons becomes infrastructure (1999–2013) | When | What happened | What it is evidence of | |---|---|---| | **2000** | SQLite begins — public domain, and explicitly **not open-contribution**. | The case that inverts nearly every assumption on this page. [See the story →](stories.md#sqlite) | | **Jul–Sep 2002** | **Blender's community buys its freedom** out of bankruptcy: €100,000 in seven weeks. | The one case where the romantic version is simply true. [See the story →](stories.md#blender) | | **Nov 2004** | **Firefox 1.0.** Six and a half years after the Netscape release. | The other half of correction 3, and the reason to state the interval rather than the outcome. | | **2005** | Git is written to replace BitKeeper after its licence terms are withdrawn. | A licence withdrawal by a single holder producing, by accident, the most widely used developer tool in the world. **An early instance of the pattern the survivability argument describes** — and of what fork capacity looks like when it exists. | | **2008** | GitHub launches; the OWASP European Summit runs in the Algarve. | Distribution stops being the problem. [The summit thread starts here →](../owasp/index.md) | | **2010** | **Oracle acquires Sun. OpenSolaris is killed.** illumos forks and survives. | The counter-case for [survivability](../survivability/index.md#cases): an OSI-approved licence did not save it; a named fork party did. | ## Eyeballs, foundations, and the wave (2014–2026) | When | What happened | What it is evidence of | |---|---|---| | **Apr 2014** | **Heartbleed.** Two years undetected in OpenSSL. The Core Infrastructure Initiative follows. | [Correction 5](index.md#eyeballs), and the first industry-scale admission that critical infrastructure was unfunded. | | **2014–2015** | **Kubernetes** released by Google; CNCF founded 2015. | The clearest strategic use of open source in the industry's history: commoditise the layer below your business. [See the story →](stories.md#kubernetes) | | **Dec 2015 – 2025** | **Let's Encrypt** enters public beta. HTTPS page loads go from under 30% globally to roughly 80%, and to around 95% in the US; issuance reaches ~10 million certificates a day by September 2025. | The largest measurable civilisational impact on the list — and the mechanism was **automation, not price**. [See the story →](stories.md#letsencrypt) | | **2018–2024** | **The relicensing wave.** MongoDB → SSPL (2018); Elastic → SSPL/ELv2 (2021); Terraform → BUSL (Aug 2023); Redis → RSAL/SSPL (Mar 2024). OpenTofu and Valkey fork within weeks. | The event the whole [survivability argument](../survivability/index.md) is built from. Every one: **a single corporate copyright holder with the standing to move.** | | **Aug 2024 – May 2025** | **Elastic adds AGPLv3; Redis 8 ships AGPLv3.** IBM's acquisition of HashiCorp closes 27 Feb 2025 — **and Terraform stays BUSL.** | [Correction 6.](index.md#reversals) Structure works in both directions, and acquisition entrenches rather than reverses. | | **Mar 2024** | **The xz backdoor** — engineered by the maintainer to survive review, found by one engineer benchmarking SSH latency. | The strongest single refutation of the eyeballs claim, and of social-trust models generally. | | **Jan 2026** | **cURL announces its bug bounty will close** on 31 January, after ~20% of 2025 submissions were AI-generated slop against ~5% genuine. | The story that belongs to this site more than any other. [Read it →](../funding/curl.md) | > **On sourcing.** This timeline is compiled from [the research document published with this site](../documents/index.md), which reports its fetch failures inline rather than working around them. Where dates are contested — the coining of "open source" is the clearest case — [the disagreement is stated](index.md#peterson) rather than resolved by picking one. Items the research could not verify from a primary source are **not on this page at all**; [they are listed as unverified](numbers.md#unverified). [← Six corrections](index.md)[Six success stories →](stories.md) --- *This page is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).*