Free and open source software has touched all our lives whether we know it or not. Often misunderstood and treated with suspicion, many businesses take advantage of the benefits of it without acknowledging the community that powers it.

Before going any further, free software is not about price, rather an ideology that advocates that software has most utility when there are no barriers to its ability to be used, improved and studied at the source code level.

To go around, open source needs input.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the GNU C Compiler (shortened to GCC) being gifted to the world. In 1987 a much younger but still probably magnificently bearded Richard M. Stallman released what is arguably one of the most important contributions to modern computing culture - a free (both in cost and in liberty) C compiler. At the simplest level compilers are software that take instructions written in a human readable structured language (such as C, in this case) and compiles it into instructions that a computer can understand (called machine code). The output of the compiler is a package of executable software referred to as libraries, executables or binaries.

Richard Stallman, often referred to online simply as RMS, founded the GNU Project in order to create a complete free and open Unix-like operating system. GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix", a recursive acronym style of which the world of IT is unfortunately fond and often reuses. At the time, Unix was a heavily IP encumbered system and solely the domain of large research institutions, corporate, government and military installations. During the early 80’s Unix, while a firmly established technology, was caught up in antitrust cases between the US Department of Justice and Bell Systems. AT&T attempted to commercialise Unix System V but this threatened to hinder collaboration between computer science researchers.