One day, I was slacking off on YouTube watching ThePrimeagen, because I like his content, the kind of developer he is, his way of joking, and the amazing community he has. I don't remember the exact video and context now, but it was the video where he mentioned a few names jokingly. I didn't get the joke, so I went to search about it.
That small search took me somewhere I wasn't expecting.
I found out about Richard Stallman, the Free Software movement, the GNU Project, and eventually the history that led to what we now commonly call open source.
I wasn't researching software history because I needed to. I just wanted to understand what the person I had just heard about had actually done. But once I started reading, the idea itself became interesting. Here is what I studied that day.
Where it started
Richard Stallman started the GNU Project in 1983 with a goal that was much bigger than simply making software available for free. He wanted users to have the freedom to use, study, modify, and share the software they were using. This became the foundation of the Free Software movement.
Then, in the late 1990s, the term "open source" emerged as another way of describing a similar development model, with more emphasis on the practical benefits of making source code available and allowing people to collaborate around it.
How much of software is open source?
What interested me wasn't really the history itself. It was realizing how much of the software world I already use is connected to this idea.
A lot of the programming languages, libraries, frameworks, databases, operating systems, developer tools, and applications we use are open source. Linux runs an enormous part of the internet. Python, JavaScript runtimes, PostgreSQL, Git, React, and countless other tools are built and maintained in the open.
Even software that doesn't look open source from the outside can depend heavily on it. Chrome, for example, is built on Chromium, which is an open-source browser project. Many other browsers build on Chromium or other open-source browser technologies.
The more I looked, the harder it became to think of open source as just "some code on GitHub."
It is a huge part of how modern software is built.
What really interests me
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what interests me about open source is not just the software itself. It is the people behind it.
Some of the software I use every day has been worked on by hundreds or even thousands of people over many years. People come and go, maintainers change, contributors move on, and some of the people who wrote the code may not even be around anymore. Yet the software keeps living, being maintained, and being improved by people who may have never met each other.
That is something I find fascinating.
I can sit at my computer in Pakistan and build something using a programming language created by someone I have never met, use a database maintained by people somewhere else in the world, use a framework that has contributions from people I will probably never know, and never even think about who those people are.
And those people don't need to know who I am either.
They could have completely different backgrounds from me. Different countries, cultures, languages, religions, social classes, political beliefs, or just completely different ways of looking at the world. In another context, some of those differences could easily put people against each other. Human beings have plenty of ways to divide themselves.
But software can create a place where those boundaries matter much less.
If we both care about the same project, we can work on the same codebase. We can review each other's work, discuss a problem, fix something together, and make the same piece of software better without ever knowing what the other person looks like or what their life is like outside that project.
That feels much bigger to me than just sharing source code.
It is a way for people who may never meet, and may have very little else in common, to build something together.
Why it stays with me
And maybe that is why the idea of open source has stayed with me.
I already love computers and programming. I like building things, understanding how they work, and using what other people have built. But open source adds another layer to that. It turns software from something that one person or one company simply creates and everyone else consumes into something that can be built, maintained, and improved collectively.
You don't have to know the people who built the thing you're using. You don't even have to agree with them on everything. You just need to care enough about the software to contribute something useful.
That is the part I find difficult to ignore.
And it makes me want to experience that kind of development for myself.