10 Best Open Source Programs Ever


Bangalore: Open-source programs refers to the programs whose source code made available and licensed so that anyone has rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

The concept of the open source programs came way before the terminology “open-source” was accepted in its meaning and form on February 3, 1998. As Richard M. Stallman, popular as rms, the software freedom activist and computer programmer noted, "When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking."

Read on to know the 10 oldest and most significant open-source programming languages as compiled by ZDNet.

#10 Linux

Came into existence: August 25, 1991

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system. The defining component of Linux is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released in 5 October 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds wrote "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones" to the Minix Usenet group, and unknowingly, started the operating system juggernaut. This OS later became the most successful of open-source programs.

It is a leading operating system on servers and other big iron systems such as mainframe computers and supercomputers. Linux also runs on embedded systems such as mobile phones, tablet computers, network routers, televisions and video game consoles; the Android system in wide use on mobile devices is built on the Linux kernel.

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