The concept behind open source software was born in the 1980s and grounded in the belief that collaboration enhances function and that constant improvements are more important than strict propriety control. This type of software is created and shared by programmers to continually improve its code.
Richard Stallman initiated the first project to develop a free operating system called GNU in 1984 and a year later founded the Free Software Foundation to support and encourage free software development. The first open source software license issued in 1989 established the ground rules, which says that anyone can use, modify, and redistribute the software, providing that they include any changes under the original license. Richard Stallman referred to this type of software as Free Open Source Software or FOSS.