I just stumbled across a nice Salon article on the history of BSD Unix. The article is from 2000 but still very interesting and relevant. Although it examines many of the key players in project, especially Bill Joy, the theme of the article is how BSD Unix and Joy essentially created the open source software movement.
Originally, the software wasn’t open the way it is today although Joy apparently wasn’t too assiduous in making sure recipients had the proper AT&T license. His and the project’s real contribution to open source was in pioneering a development process. A small core team acted as gatekeepers for contributions from many individual developers. Everyone was eligible to play although the filtering was strict and most contributions were not accepted. It worked pretty much the way present day big projects work. Linux, of course, has a core team of one and the organization is a bit different but you can see its genesis in the BSD project.
If you’re a Unix fan or interested in computing history, you will find this article interesting and worth reading. It’s a part of our heritage that every serious developer should be aware of. I really enjoyed it.