<P> In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration , often shared as public - domain software . As such , it was generally distributed under the principles of openness and co-operation long established in the fields of academia , and was not seen as a commodity in itself . Such communal behavior later became a central element of the so - called hacking culture ( a term with a positive connotation among open - source programmers ) . At this time , source code , the human - readable form of software , was generally distributed with the software machine code because users frequently modified the software themselves , because it would not run on different hardware or OS without modification , and also to fix bugs or add new functions . The first example of free and open - source software is believed to be the A-2 system , developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953 , which was released to customers with its source code . They were invited to send their improvements back to UNIVAC . Later , almost all IBM mainframe software was also distributed with source code included . User groups such as that of the IBM 701 , called SHARE , and that of Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC ) , called DECUS were formed to facilitate the exchange of software . The SHARE Operating System , originally developed by General Motors , was distributed by SHARE for the IBM 709 and 7090 computers . Some university computer labs did even have a policy requiring that all programs installed on the computer had to come with published source - code files . </P>
<P> In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration , often shared as public - domain software . As such , it was generally distributed under the principles of openness and co-operation long established in the fields of academia , and was not seen as a commodity in itself . Such communal behavior later became a central element of the so - called hacking culture ( a term with a positive connotation among open - source programmers ) . At this time , source code , the human - readable form of software , was generally distributed with the software machine code because users frequently modified the software themselves , because it would not run on different hardware or OS without modification , and also to fix bugs or add new functions . The first example of free and open - source software is believed to be the A-2 system , developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953 , which was released to customers with its source code . They were invited to send their improvements back to UNIVAC . Later , almost all IBM mainframe software was also distributed with source code included . User groups such as that of the IBM 701 , called SHARE , and that of Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC ) , called DECUS were formed to facilitate the exchange of software . The SHARE Operating System , originally developed by General Motors , was distributed by SHARE for the IBM 709 and 7090 computers . Some university computer labs did even have a policy requiring that all programs installed on the computer had to come with published source - code files . </P>
who created the first open source operating system
who created the first open source operating system
Remington Rand
Remington Rand