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mattyj writes "Great white paper from netaction.org (another great site) that outlines the history of open source, how it came to be, why it almost died, and why it's coming back. Rather lengthy but it filled in a lot of holes that were missing in my knowledge base of what OS was/is."

Today, CETI has suffered another set-back. CETI is the for-profit limited liability joint venture that Microsoft, GTE, Hughes Electronics and Fujitsu want to set up to become the exclusive technology provider to California State University. The deadline for CETI to sign the ten-year exclusivity deal has been postponed from the end of March to end of May, having originally been scheduled for the end of January. Many fear that the deal will influence students, biassing them in their professional lives against competitor products which they have never encountered. Coming from Europe, I have been surprised at work, by how few Americans encountered Unix at University. In Europe, using Unix is required for many sciences, and definitely for Computer Science. Netaction has organized a campaign against CETI.