Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation in the 1980s began a rebellion against the proprietary software of big firms and bet on the idea that users could contribute to innovation. He developed GNU (standing for Gnu’s Not Unix) to challenge the position of the Unix operating system. In 1991 Linus Torvalds invented the open-source Linux operating system, incorporating features of GNU, which gradually took over much of the computing world, gaining total dominance of the supercomputer market and more recently colonizing the mobile market through Google’s Android devices.
