In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration, often shared as public - domain software. As such, it was generally distributed under the principles of openness and co-operation long established in the fields of academia, and was not seen as a commodity in itself. Such communal behavior later became a central element of the so - called hacking culture (a term with a positive connotation among open - source programmers). At this time, source code, the human - readable form of software, was generally distributed with the software machine code because users frequently modified the software themselves, because it would not run on different hardware or OS without modification, and also to fix bugs or add new functions. The first example of free and open - source software is believed to be the A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953, which was released to customers with its source code. They were invited to send their improvements back to UNIVAC. Later, almost all IBM mainframe software was also distributed with source code included. User groups such as that of the IBM 701, called SHARE, and that of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), called DECUS were formed to facilitate the exchange of software. The SHARE Operating System, originally developed by General Motors, was distributed by SHARE for the IBM 709 and 7090 computers. Some university computer labs did even have a policy requiring that all programs installed on the computer had to come with published source - code files.
who created the first open source operating system
Remington Rand