primer on open source legal issues. International Free and Open Source Software Law Review offers peer-reviewed information for lawyers on free software issues. Richard Stallman, a supporter of the free software movement, was one of the free software and open source movement advocates who proposed an alternative to the private models prevalent in the industry. After developing a non proprietary operating system called GNU, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1983. For most of the 1970s and 1980s, organizations such as AT&T, with their Unix operating system initiative, have promoted a policy of shared source code. Linus Torvalds then built upon Stallman’s development in the late 1980s and created the Linux operating system that he released under Stallman’s GNU General Public License. This enabled open source programmers to improve, modify, and develop his system. [ 14 ] The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was also instrumental in the formalization of the Open Source Movement. The OSI was founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens in February 1998 with the purpose of providing general education and advocacy of the open source label through the creation of the Open Source Definition that was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The OSI has become one of the main supporters and advocators of the open source movement. [ 15 ] In February 1998 the open source movement was adopted, formalized, and spearheaded by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an organization formed to market software “as something more amenable to commercial business use” [