Gilles explained very well the evolution from piece to another here, so I will cover the topic from more broad perspective and give some hints for further research.
From Bazaars and Research Labs to Closed Blobs and Market-marginalized Groups that I think are not that marginal at all
The key term to play with evolution is power. If you are dependent on an OS, for example in the form of security updates, you are dependent on the software-manufacturer and hence it has power over you. It can decide to stop publishing security updates or do any evil that its license allows it to do. If the OS is closed, the users must feel helpless because they cannot fix problems on their own, perhaps shown in hypocriticical feelings such as again the damn driver broken, XYZ's fault. In the latter discussion, you can s,OS,sofware,g and it does not really lose its meaning about power-relationship, clearly some thing being timeless.
I won't reinvent the damn wheel so please read about Bazaars, corporations and social-environmental-and-other problems below.
Start
- Homebrew computer club before Apple and such things when things were open.
- Computer History Museum covers a lot of good things here.
- "Homestead High School Electronics Club, Cupertino, California" about Apple's founding member here.
Ending, Now and Still Evolving
For visualizing the evolution, please, see the picture below from Wikipedia where things started from Bazaar (orange phase) and ended to red-green phase where things are still evolving or even chaotic. The picture is wrong or pro-Minix-advertising in some points, n.b. comments. Please, read about the Minix-Linux -turning point and differentiate the
marketing free,free-as-beerandfree-as-speech-- the debate here. Shortly, Minix was notfree-as-free-speechand Tanenbaum made money with it while Linus offered his OS with less restrictive license, very important years to understand so do not get misguided by some oddities in the picture. This crucial point later affected separate parties such as FreeBSD, Linux and Mimix -formation to their current form. Please, note that I don't call them with cohesive terms such as"open-source"because the term is getting misused.When I used the term bazaar in the title, I really meant it. It is to some extent chaotic so it is hard to get a large picture but then again there are some very systematic groups. The one who can offer the most appropriate solution to current problem will get awarded and can sell his/her products on the market. Sometimes, a developer beats a huge 100 heads' dev teams and sometimes contrary. Torvards have drawn a good analogy with closed blob and open code (or equivalent in some email) to the science and alchemy. I think his point was that while alchemists are extinct in science, you can still find them in Software -area. He did not explain it much but my idea is that alchemists today exist in software engineering because it can be useful time-to-time, some practical situations require creative solutions. It is a bit like physicists used the sirac-delta-distribution over about 30years (according to my lecturer) before mathematicians agreed that it could be formulated in Mathematics, this phase may take some time. But do not underestimate the speculative frenzy in human instincts, it is surprising how many times I have seen people writing something "new", finding it was already invented. Welcome back to the bazaar!
Culture, Money and Intellectual Capital
The FOSS movement is not a marginal body, please, note that they do have their own things such as music (here or here)and more-and-more hardware (here) -- if your media says something else or nothing, they are ignoramuses. The movement is more like a culture -- so the term movement is rather misleading -- with their own slants, habits and even past-times, perhaps hard to grasp the idea but more I get into it, the more I think it is but beware wanna-be-users -- it does no good get involved into meaningless debates about
freeandclosedif the terms are not well-defined or documented like here.I often find it stupid that people compare this decentralized thing to certain bureaucratic firms, not all of them, because the goal of many innovators per se is many time to have fun instead to create money. So the question like
"do they get paid?"is a bit arrogant, did you get paid to be a roman or do you now get paid to be XYZ-citizen? Probably not or perhaps -- with a successful endeavor -- you need to wisely choose your camp as always. There are however other important things, such as knowledge, responsibility and co-operation, sometimes hard to measure in $. Is it actually called IC with business people? If so, you may get important skills by engaging to some project, an asset highly appreciated with knowledgeable firms -- but again seen too much wanna-be-reinventing-the-wheel-code so do good research before getting too much involved.If you want to know how to get
"paid"with this field. I would suggest to research about risk-reward -relationship, perhaps in Money.SO. The unix tools are like science, they are very liberal and allow you to do many things. It depends on the user whether you get paid or not. I think to get paid you need to get into some risky projects like time-consuming/hard/ignored. There is no easy way to get paid anywhere. Why would there be? If there was an easy way, the markets were not efficient. The reason why some big corps get paid is that they have taken huge risks and loans and now get rewarded, sometimes their actions are evil and they may get punished. But for an individual, I suggest a slow steady advancing. To understand why think about unix's early history about research labs, a lot of slow monotone working and prototyping.
Want to know more?
Your questions have too many confusions to attack them easily, such as presupposition about hierarchy that ignores the idea about chaos and ambiguous terms such as Windows -- dev branch or branding? And the term from Unix in the title tastes too much appealing-to-populism-in-Unix-quesion-site. It is hard to say how /dev/null such as W. and other closed things evolved because we don't know them, except speculation! People who know cannot speak. The source is primary, the rest is secondary. Be sure which blindfolds, i.e. search engine, you use for this topic, many valuable articles are dumped with irrelevant information as the case with the above removed article. As a starting point, you could try some links offered above or below.
