Economy, History and Philosophy of the ''Open Source''

INTRODUCTION The phenomenon of the free software/Open Source has caught the attention of a relatively wide audience only in the last years, even though its origins go back to the half of the fourties, to the dawning of the data processing science. The software, developed in that period exclusively by university departments and research's laboratories of big enterprises, was considered as a scientific product, as mathematics and physics, and thus was considered. As in a scientific experiment are distributed the hypotheses, the proceeding and the results, so for the software were distributed the requirement analysis and the source code, thus everyone could evaluate the results. It was not a political choice, the free distribution was the result of an ascertainment that software grows in stability, performances and functionality if it can be entirely understood and modified by its users. Therefore in that so definite context the degree of cooperation among the programmers was utmost: if someone was working at a program, whoever could have a copy of it for making improvements, or a part of the code to implement an own software. Later in the first eighties, with the diffusion of the data processing distributed tools, that are the personal computers, the software grew quickly in possibility of use and interesting the commercial sphere, which saw in the