I mentioned a few days ago I was reading Nicholas G. Carr’s Does IT Matter?. In it he mentions possibly the earliest recorded example of open-source development – back in the 1950s – quoting from Martin Campbell Kelly’s From Airline reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog – a History of the Software Industry.

Now I’d always thought of open-source as something invented by hackers in the 1970′s. The Open Source Institute describes open-source as …an idea whose time has finally come. For twenty years it has been building momentum… Now it’s breaking out into the commercial world…. Twenty years or fifty years? Off to the library to get hold of Campbell-Kelly – they don’t have it, so off to a bookshop (remember bookshops?).

And yes, there it is. In the early days of mainframes, IBM sold little more than bare hardware. It was worried that its customers would bankrupt themselves writing the basic system software and utilities which were a pre-requisite to getting anything useful out of their new 701s. So, R.Blair Smith in IBM Santa Monica pulled together an inaugural user group meeting in November 1952 to encourage the sharing of code.

IBM repeated the same process with the launch of the 704 in May 1954. In August 1955 the seventeen organisations running 704s formed a user group called SHARE. By the first anniversary, they had shared 700 programs and had saved “of the order of 1.5 million US Dollars”.

Is this the first documented example of the savings to be made from open-source? And far from open-source now breaking out into the commercial world, open-source was there right from the start, driving up code quality, and saving huge sums of money.

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