A Brief History of Open Source and Graphic Design Software

In general, the history of software used in graphic design is fairly complex. But let’s just say it all began in 1985 with Aldus PageMaker 1.0, the first desktop publishing suite for the Macintosh operating system. Later, PageMaker was also released for the Windows operating system. Thus, the history of graphic design software begins with a commercial desktop publishing suite.*

Open source as we know it had had its beginnings the year before the release of PageMaker, with GNU, a free UNIX like operating system (the acronym GNU is recursive and stands for “GNU’s not Unix”).  This eventually led to the creation of the GNU license in 1989 (basically as a measure to prevent people from using free software code in commercial applications and then claiming copyright on it themselves).

In 1995, ten years after the origins of both design software and open source, a program named GIMP was developed by two California Berkeley students. GIMP was a graphical image manipulation program “akin to photoshop.” Originally standing for “General Image Manipulation Program”, the acronym came to mean “GNU Image Manipulation Program” after it was released under the GNU license.

GIMP 2.6.11 (current release as of October 2011)

Since the release of GIMP, many other open source software packages for graphic design have been developed. These include CinePaint, Open Office Draw, and InkScape, just to name a few.

*Aldus went on to turn down the opportunity to acquire the rights to a new program called Photoshop in 1990, which was licensed by Adobe instead. In 1994, Aldus was bought out by Adobe. Aldus PageMaker became Adobe PageMaker, the current release of which is Adobe PageMaker 7 (at the time of this writing).

References

Apple Macintosh Software - PageMaker 2.0a, 3½" Floppy Disk, 1987. Museum Victoria. Retrieved October 14, 2011, from http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/items/1238704/apple-macintosh-software-pagemaker-2-0a-3-floppy-disk-1987

(August 1, 2011). Adobe PageMaker. Wikipedia. Retrieved October 15, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker

West, Angela. (February 2, 2010). 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop. Webdesigner Depot. Retrieved October 15, 2011, from http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/02/20-years-of-adobe-photoshop/

What is GNU? GNU. Retrieved October 14, 2011, from http://www.gnu.org/

(January 6, 2003). The History of the GPL. Free-Soft. Retrieved October 14, 2011 from http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/

Prehistory (How it all started…). GIMP. Retrieved October 14, 2011 from http://www.gimp.org/about/prehistory.html