In fact the movement dates back to the early 1980s when Richard Stallman, an MIT researcher, developed the idea of free software.
Users ought to be free to modify programmes to meet their own needs.
The only way to make that possible is to distribute programmes in their original code, rather than the binary form in which proprietary software comes. The source code is locked in Bill Gates's safe. The intellectual property rights embodied in proprietary programmes had created global corporations like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, and made huge personal fortunes. Free software belonged with caftans and the Grateful Dead on the scrapheap of history. Suddenly the industry is scrambling to board the free software bandwagon.