is kingston upon thames in london or surrey

Kingston upon Thames, also known as Kingston, is an area of south west London, England, located 10.4 miles (16.7Â km) south west of Charing Cross. It is the administrative centre of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, and identified as a major metropolitan centre in the London Plan.

Kingston upon Thames

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Kingston lies approximately 33 feet (10 metres) above sea level. It is notable as the ancient market town in which Saxon kings were crowned. Kingston was part of a large ancient parish in the county of Surrey and the town was an ancient borough, reformed in 1835. It has been the location of Surrey County Hall from 1893, extraterritorially in terms of local government administration since Kingston became part of Greater London in 1965. Most of the town centre is part of the KT1 postcode area, but some areas north of Kingston railway station have the postcode KT2 instead. The population of the town itself, comprising the four wards of Canbury, Grove, Norbiton and Tudor, was 43,013 in the 2011 census.[1]

Kingston was called Cyninges tun in 838, Chingestune in 1086, Kingeston in 1164, Kyngeston super Tamisiam in 1321 and Kingestowne upon Thames in 1589. The name means 'the king's manor or estate' from the Old English words cyning and tun. It belonged to the king in Saxon times and was the earliest royal borough.[2] It was first mentioned in 838 as the site of a meeting between King Egbert of Wessex and Ceolnoth, Archbishop of Canterbury.[3] Kingston lay on the boundary between the ancient kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, until in the early tenth century when King Athelstan united both to create the kingdom of England. Probably because of the town's symbolic location, several tenth-century kings were crowned in Kingston, Æthelstan in 925, Eadred in 946 and Æthelred in 978. Other kings who may have been crowned there are Edward the Elder in 902, Edmund in 939, Eadwig in 956, Edgar in about 960 and Edward the Martyr in 975. It was later thought that the coronations took place in the chapel of St Mary, which collapsed in 1730, and a large stone recovered from the ruins has been regarded since the eighteenth century as the Coronation Stone. It was initially used as a mounting block, but in 1850 it was moved to a more dignified place in the market before finally being moved to its current location in the grounds of the guildhall.[4][5]

For much of the 20th century, Kingston was a major military aircraft manufacturing centre specialising in fighter aircraft â€“ first with Sopwith Aviation, H G Hawker Engineering, later Hawker Aircraft, Hawker Siddeley and eventually British Aerospace. The renowned Sopwith Camel, Hawker Fury, Hurricane, Hunter and Harrier were all designed and built in the town and examples of all of these aircraft can be seen today at the nearby Brooklands Museum in Weybridge. Well known aviation personalities Sydney Camm, Harry Hawker and Tommy Sopwith were responsible for much of Kingston's achievements in aviation. British Aerospace finally closed its Lower Ham Road factory in 1992;[6] part of the site was subsequently redeveloped for housing but the riverside part houses a community centre and sports complex. The growth and development of Kingston Polytechnic and its transformation into Kingston University has made Kingston a university town.

Kingston upon Thames formed an ancient parish in the Kingston hundred of Surrey. The parish of Kingston upon Thames covered a large area including Hook, Kew, New Malden, Petersham, Richmond, Surbiton, Thames Ditton and East Molesey.[7]

The town of Kingston was granted a charter by King John in 1200, but the oldest one to survive is from 1208 and this document is housed in the town's archives. Other charters were issued by later kings, including Edward IV's charter that gave the town the status of a borough in 1481. The borough covered a much smaller area than the ancient parish, although as new parishes were split off the borough and parish eventually became identical in 1894. The borough was reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, becoming the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames (then spelt with hyphens). It had been known as a Royal borough through custom and the right to the title was confirmed by George V in 1927.[8] Kingston upon Thames has been the location of Surrey County Council since it moved from Newington in 1893.

In 1965 the local government of Greater London was reorganised and the municipal borough was abolished. Its former area was merged with that of the Municipal Borough of Surbiton and the Municipal Borough of Malden and Coombe, to form the London Borough of Kingston upon Thames. At the request of Kingston upon Thames London Borough Council another Royal Charter was granted by Queen Elizabeth II entitling it to continue using the title "Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames" for the new borough.

Kingston was built at the first crossing point of the Thames upstream from London Bridge and a bridge still exists at the same site. It was this 'great bridge' that gave it its early importance in the 13th century.[3] Kingston was occupied by the Romans, and later it was either a royal residence or a royal demesne. There is a record of a council held there in 838, at which Egbert of Wessex, King of Wessex, and his son Ethelwulf of Wessex were present. In the Domesday Book it was held by William the Conqueror. Its domesday assets were: a church, five mills, four fisheries worth 10s, 27 ploughs, 40 acres (160,000 m2) of meadow, woodland worth six hogs. It rendered £31 10s (£31.5).[10]

In 1730 the chapel containing the royal effigies collapsed, burying the sexton, who was digging a grave, the sexton's daughter and another person. The daughter survived this accident and was her father's successor as sexton. Kingston sent members to early Parliaments, until a petition by the inhabitants prayed to be relieved from the burden. Another chapel, the collegiate chapel of St Mary Magdalene, The Lovekyn Chapel, still exists. It was founded in 1309 by a former mayor of London, Edward Lovekyn. It is the only private chantry chapel to survive the Reformation.[11]

With the coming of the railway in the 1830s, there was a great deal of development to the south of the town. Much of this became the new town of Surbiton, but the Surbiton Park estate, built in the grounds of Surbiton Place in the 1850s, remained part of Kingston during the period of the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames.

A permanent military presence was established in the borough with the completion of The Barracks in 1875.[12]

Kingston straddles two Parliamentary constituencies: the area north of the railway line is part of Richmond Park, which is represented by Zac Goldsmith of the Conservative Party, and the area south of the railway line (including the ancient town centre) is part of Kingston and Surbiton and is Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats.

Central Kingston is a busy predominantly retail centre, with a small number of commercial offices and civic buildings. The shopping centre includes a shopping mall, "The Bentall Centre", containing the Bentalls department store and large branches of chain stores found in many British high streets. There is a large branch of the John Lewis department store group, with a Waitrose supermarket, located in the basement. The Rotunda, located in a former Bentalls furniture depository building (a local landmark), includes a bowling alley, fitness centre, a 15-screen Odeon multiplex cinema and a few restaurants. Recent developments along the riverside south of Kingston Bridge have added bars, restaurants and a theatre, the Rose Theatre which opened in 2008 with Sir Peter Hall as the director.

The ancient market is still held daily in the Market Place, including today such produce as fish, jewellery, exotic foods, local foods and flowers.

Kingston's civic buildings include a local museum, public library, modern Crown Court and smaller county court and the Guildhall by the part-culverted mouth of the Hogsmill River which houses Kingston Council and magistrates' court. A short distance away is the County Hall Building which houses the main offices of Surrey County Council. From 1893–1965, before Kingston became one of the 32 London boroughs of Greater London, it was the county town of Surrey following the period of 1791–1893 when Newington had this role. Guildford has officially reclaimed this ancient, now ceremonial title as Kingston is no longer administered by Surrey.[13]

Kingston's main open space is the River Thames, with its lively frontage of bars and restaurants. Downstream there is a walk through Canbury Gardens towards Teddington Lock. Upstream there is a promenade crossing the Hogsmill river and reaching almost to Surbiton. Across Kingston Bridge is a tree lined river bank fronting the expanse of Hampton Court Park.

Kingston has many pubs and restaurants and several public houses in the centre have become restaurants or bars. The more traditional pubs tend to be in the northern part of the town (Canbury) and include The Canbury Arms, Park Tavern, The Wych Elm and Willoughby Arms. Further south are found the Druid's Head, the Spring Grove, The Cricketers, The Albion Tavern, The Duke Of Buckingham, and several small local pubs around Fairfield. The Druid's Head is notable as one of the first taverns to make the famous dessert syllabub in the 18th century.[citation needed] There are several Chinese, Indian, Thai and Italian restaurants.

The local newspapers are the weekly paid-for Surrey Comet, which celebrated its 150th year in 2004,[14] and the free Kingston Guardian.

In 2010 retail footprint research, Kingston ranked 25th in terms of retail expenditure in the UK at £810 million, equal to Covent Garden and just ahead of Southampton. This puts it as generating the fifth most amount of money from the retail sector in Greater London, passing Croydon, with just four West End alternatives ahead.[15] In 2005, Kingston was 24th with £864 million.[16]

A notable dramatic arts venue is the Rose Theatre. This theatre opened on 16 January 2008 and seats approximately 899 people. The audience are arranged around the semi-circular stage. All Saints Church is host to classical choral and music concerts mostly on Saturdays and houses a Frobenius organ. There are a number of choral societies including the Kingston Orpheus Choir and the Kingston Choral Society, an amateur symphony orchestra the Kingston Philharmonia, and the Kingston and District Chamber Music Society. A number of annual festivals are organised by the Council and Kingston Arts Council including Kingston Readers' Festival, Think-in-Kingston and the Festival of the Voice. Kingston University runs the Stanley Picker Gallery and Kingston Museum has a changing gallery on the first floor. A regular singing group at the Rose Theatre caters to schools and families.[17]

John Galsworthy the author was born on Kingston Hill and Jacqueline Wilson grew up, and went to school in Kingston and still lives there today. Both are commemorated at Kingston University â€“ Galsworthy in the newest building and Wilson in the main hall. Also commemorated at the University is photographer Eadweard Muybridge who was born at Kingston and changed the spelling of his first name in reference to the name of the Saxon king on the Coronation Stone. He was a pioneer in the photography of the moving image. R. C. Sheriff the playwright is also associated with Kingston, writing his first play to support Kingston Rowing Club.[18] An earlier writer born in Kingston was John Cleland.[19]

Kingston has been covered in literature, film and television. It is where the comic Victorian novel Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome begins; cannons aimed against the Martians in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds are positioned on Kingston Hill; in The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence the youngest Brangwen dreams of a job in Kingston upon Thames in a long, lyrical passage; Mr. Knightly in Emma by Jane Austen regularly visits Kingston, although the narrative never follows him there.

Fine art is also a prominent feature in the history of Kingston. Both John Hoyland and Jeremy Moon worked from permanent studios in Kingston and many prominent artists and designers have studied at the university including Fiona Banner, John Bratby, David Nash and Jasper Morrison.

Early in his music career, the guitarist and singer-songwriter Eric Clapton spent time busking in Kingston upon Thames,[20] having grown up and studied in the area.[21] Rock band Cardiacs were formed in the town.

Kingston is mentioned (and used as a filming location) in episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus. More recently, a scene from Mujhse Dosti Karoge, a Bollywood film starring Hrithik Roshan as the leading actor, was filmed by the toppled telephone boxes sculpture in Old London Road. A scene in the television programme The Good Life sees Richard Briers get on a 71 bus in 'The Avenue' towards Kingston town centre (albeit this route never served the east side of Surbiton where the series is set). The 1974 Doctor Who story "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" used several locations in the town for filming.[22] The 2008 series of Primeval, shown on ITV1 in January, featured almost an entire episode filmed inside the Bentall Centre and John Lewis department stores. Kingston featured in Primeval again in May 2009 with several scenes shot in and around the Market Place. Nipper, the famous "His Master's Voice" (HMV) dog, is buried in the town under Lloyds Bank. His owners lived nearby in Fife Road.

Kingston Green Fair was held annually from 1987 to 2008 in Canbury Gardens, next to the river, on the Spring Bank Holiday.[23] The word "Green" in the title refers to the ethos of the fair as promoting sustainable development. For instance no meat or other products derived from dead animals were allowed to be sold, and no electricity was permitted on the site unless generated by wind, sun, or bicycle power.[24] Kingston is also home to Crack Comedy Club which opened at The Grey Horse Pub in 2002.

One of the more unusual sights in Kingston is Out of Order by David Mach, a sculpture in the form of twelve disused red telephone boxes that have been tipped up to lean against one another in an arrangement resembling dominoes. The work was commissioned in 1988 as part of the landscaping for the new Relief Road, and was described by its creator as "anti-minimalist".[25]

The town is served by two South Western Railway routes advertised from London as to Shepperton and to Strawberry Hill, though the second route is a complete loop. Three railway stations serve the town on this line from London Waterloo station:

Norbiton is east of the town centre near Kingston Hospital, and Hampton Wick is to the west across Kingston Bridge. New Malden, Wimbledon and Richmond upon Thames are on the lines. A primary stop exists on the nearby main (express) line in nearby Surbiton which has a peak hour non-stopping service to Waterloo. The town led to the South Western Main Line being in Surbiton as much of Kingston's wealth and status were as a direct consequence of the road and stagecoach network developed as a result of its crossing on the Thames. Local landowners would not consent to the line coming through their land so in 1838 the rail station was built a few miles out at Surbiton, which was known as Kingston Upon Railway and led to the development of Surbiton. Kingston recognised the need for a railway, and in the 1860s Kingston opened. However, due to the eastern landowners' resistance, the line had to take a longer route via Richmond upon Thames. Only later did the line receive all the relevant permissions for a closer link, connecting to London Waterloo via Norbiton.

The A3 road runs from central London towards Kingston before by-passing the town to the east. The "Kingston bypass road" was one of the first arterial roads to be built in Britain. It was originally proposed in 1912 to relieve the pressure of traffic in the town centre, but World War I delayed the start of work until 1924. It was opened by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on 28 October 1927. Kingston is also served by the A240, the A307 (Portsmouth Road), A308 and A310.

Kingston has a large number of car parks, connected by a one-way system. It is also one of the main centres of the south-west London bus network.

Compared with other outer London boroughs and towns in Surrey, a high proportion of trips are made by bicycle in Kingston. The 2011 census identified that 2.8% of journeys to work were made by bicycle.

Riverboats run regularly between Kingston and Hampton Court as well as Richmond all during the summer season. There are also direct services to Putney and Westminster from Hampton Court connected by the 10â€“15 minute interval route 111 to London Heathrow, the destination for X26 an express service also serving the bus station and the Bentall Centre. Of more local note, bus services connect in most directions, including Dorking and Tooting Broadway.

Kingston is the location of Kingston University and Kingston College. There are 34 Primary schools (including Infant and Junior), of which 14 are Church Schools, 10 Secondary Schools and 14 Private schools which provide education for all age ranges. Primary schools include Latchmere School, Fernhill School and St Agathas Catholic Primary School. Kingston also is home to Tiffin School, The Tiffin Girls' School and Kingston Grammar School, all of which have large catchment areas across Greater London and Surrey.

The 12th century church of All Saints serves the Church of England parish of Kingston which lies ecclesiastically in the Diocese of Southwark, although there has been a church in Kingston since at least 838.[26] The suffragan or Area Bishop of Kingston is the Rt Rev. Dr Richard Cheetham. Other Anglican churches in Kingston, of more recent date, are St John the Evangelist and St Luke. Kingston lies in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark, and there is a Roman Catholic Church dedicated to Saint Agatha. Kingston is also the home of the Kingston Surbiton & District Synagogue. Kingston also has a Quaker meeting house, a Mosque and a Sikh Gurdwara.

Kingston is the home of four association football clubs, AFC Wimbledon and Kingstonian, both of whom play at the Kingsmeadow Stadium, Corinthian-Casuals who play in Tolworth and Chessington & Hook United who play in Chessington. AFC Wimbledon have played in League One since the 2016–17 season, whereas Kingstonian, Corinthian-Casuals and Chessington & Hook United are non-league clubs.

Kingston Athletic Club and Polytechnic Harriers are based at the neighbouring Kingsmeadow athletics stadium. This stadium boasts a 400m track which is floodlit, a gym and 5-a-side football facilities. In the 2013 season the men competed in Division 3 of the British Athletics League. Kingston Rugby Club is based on the outskirts of the town, and Kingston Rowing Club is based on the River Thames. Kingston Regatta takes place on the river at the town in July.

The town has a large leisure centre next to Fairfield named the Kingfisher Centre, which contains an indoor swimming pool and gymnasium. Sport in Kingston is promoted and encouraged by Sport Kingston, an organisation funded by the Royal Borough of Kingston.

Kingston Wildcats School of Basketball is a community basketball development club that practices and plays its home fixtures at Chessington Community College, competing in the Surrey League and Basketball England National League.

The borough was the setting for four cycling events during the 2012 Summer Olympics, the men's road race, women's road race, men's road time trial and women's road time trial. Prior to the opening of the games, Kingston hosted the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay on two occasions with the flame travelling through the borough on 24 July 2012 and aboard the Gloriana in a cauldron on 27 July 2012 en route to the Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony.

Kingston upon Thames has been twinned with Oldenburg in Germany since 2010.[27] It also has been historically twinned with the town Delft in the Netherlands. In 2016, Kingston upon Thames has been twinned with Jaffna in Sri Lanka.[28]

* Dickens, Charles, Jr (1994) [1887, 1879]. Dickens's Dictionary of the Thames, 1887 (facsimile ed.). Devon: Old House Books. ISBN 978-1-8735-9012-6. CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link) – A guide to the Thames written by the novelist's son


who founded the grange what was its original purpose

President Andrew Johnson commissioned Oliver Kelley to go to the Southern states and to collect data to improve Southern agricultural conditions. In the South, poor farmers bore the brunt of the Civil War and were suspicious of Northerners like Kelley. Kelley found he was able to overcome these sectional differences as a Mason. With Southern Masons as guides, he toured the war-torn countryside in the South and was appalled by the outdated farming practices. He saw the need for an organization that would bring people from the North and South together in a spirit of mutual cooperation and, after many letters and consultations with the other founders, the Grange was born.[1] The first Grange, Grange #1, was founded in 1868 in Fredonia, New York.[2] Seven men and one woman co-founded the Grange: Oliver Hudson Kelley, William Saunders, Francis M. McDowell, John Trimble, Aaron B. Grosh, John R. Thompson, William M. Ireland, and Caroline Hall.[3]

The Grange, officially referred to as The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, is a fraternal organization in the United States that encourages families to band together to promote the economic and political well-being of the community and agriculture. The Grange, founded after the Civil War in 1867, is the oldest American agricultural advocacy group with a national scope. The Grange actively lobbied state legislatures and Congress for political goals, such as the Granger Laws to lower rates charged by railroads, and rural free mail delivery by the Post Office.

In 2005, the Grange had a membership of 160,000, with organizations in 2,100 communities in 36 states. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., in a building built by the organization in 1960. Many rural communities in the United States still have a Grange Hall and local Granges still serve as a center of rural life for many farming communities.

Paid agents organized local Granges and membership in the Grange increased dramatically from 1873 (200,000) to 1875 (858,050). Many of the state and local granges adopted non-partisan political resolutions, especially regarding the regulation of railroad transportation costs. The organization was unusual at this time because women and any teen old enough to draw a plow were encouraged to participate. The importance of women was reinforced by requiring that four of the elected positions could be held only by women.[4]

Rapid growth infused the national organization with money from dues, and many local granges established consumer cooperatives, initially supplied by the wholesaler Aaron Montgomery Ward. Poor fiscal management, combined with organizational difficulties resulting from rapid growth, led to a massive decline in membership. By the turn of the 20th century, the Grange rebounded and membership stabilized.

The Granger movement supported efforts by politicians to regulate rates charged by the railroads and grain warehouses. It claimed credit for the ideas of the Cooperative Extension Service, Rural Free Delivery, and the Farm Credit System. The peak of their political reputation was marked by the Supreme Court decision in Munn v. Illinois (1877), which held that grain warehouses were a "private utility in the public interest," and so could be regulated by public law. However this achievement was overturned later by the Supreme Court in Wabash v. Illinois (1886).[5] The Grange also endorsed the temperance cause to avoid alcohol, the direct election of Senators and women's suffrage.

Grange membership has declined considerably as the percentage of American farmers has fallen from a third of the population in the early 20th century to less than two percent today. Between 1992 and 2007, the number of Grange members fell by 40%.[6] Washington has the largest membership of any state, at approximately 13,000.[citation needed]

As of 2013[update] the Grange continues to press for the causes of farmers, including issues of free trade and farm policy. In its 2006 Journal of Proceedings, the organization's report on its annual convention, the organization lays out its mission and how it works towards achieving it through fellowship, service, and legislation:

The Grange provides opportunities for individuals and families to develop to their highest potential in order to build stronger communities and states, as well as a stronger nation.

As a non-partisan organization, the Grange supports only policies, never political parties or candidates. Although the Grange was founded to serve the interests of farmers, because of the shrinking farm population the Grange has begun to broaden its range to include a wide variety of issues, and anyone is welcome to join the Grange.

The Junior Grange is open to children 5-14. Regular Grange membership is open to anyone age 14 or older. The Grange Youth, a group within the Grange, consists of members 13 1/2-35.

In 2013, the Grange signed on to a letter to Congress calling for the doubling of legal immigration and legalization for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. However, this position has been somewhat revised, and the Grange now emphasizes an expansion in the H-2A visa program to increase legal immigration and address the crisis-level labor shortage in agriculture. They support the enforcement of immigration law but urge discretion with regard to the impact on labor availability. [7]

When the Grange first began in 1867, it borrowed some of its rituals and symbols from Freemasonry, including secret meetings, oaths and special passwords.[8] It also copied ideas from Greek and Roman mythology and the Bible. Small, ceremonial farm tools are often displayed at Grange meetings. Elected officers are in charge of opening and closing each meeting. There are seven degrees of Grange membership; the ceremony of each degree relates to the seasons and various symbols and principles.[9]

During the last few decades, the Grange has moved toward public meetings and no longer meets in secret. Though the secret meetings do not occur, the Grange still acknowledges its rich history and practices some traditions.[citation needed]

The Grange is a hierarchical organization ranging from local communities to the National Grange organization. At the local level are community Granges, otherwise known as subordinate Granges. All members are affiliated with at least one subordinate. In most states, multiple subordinate Granges are grouped together to form Pomona Granges. Typically, Pomona Granges are made up of all the subordinates in a county. Next in the order come State Granges, which is where the Grange begins to be especially active in the political process. State Masters (Presidents) are responsible for supervising the administration of Subordinate and Pomona Granges. Together, thirty-five State Granges, as well as Potomac Grange #1 in Washington, D.C., form the National Grange. The National Grange represents the interests of most Grangers in lobbying activities similar to the state, but on a much larger scale. In addition, the National Grange oversees the Grange ritual. The Grange is a grassroots organization; virtually all policy originates at the subordinate level.

The motto of the Grange is In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas ("In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity"). Indeed, the word "grange" comes from a Latin word for grain, and is related to a "granary" or, generically, a farm.


who made i can make your hands clap

"HandClap" is a song recorded by American indie pop band Fitz and The Tantrums. The song was released as the lead single from their self-titled album Fitz and the Tantrums on March 25, 2016, through Elektra Records. It is their highest-charting song on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 53.[1]

HandClap

The song describes the singer's desire for his lover, interpolated with a chorus of the singer asserting, "I can make your hands clap".

*sales figures based on certification alone
^shipments figures based on certification alone
sales+streaming figures based on certification alone


who created the first open source operating system

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.[2][3][not in citation given] 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,[4] which was released to customers with its source code. They were invited to send their improvements back to UNIVAC.[5] 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.[6]

History of free and open-source software

In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code, the human-readable form of software, was generally distributed with the software providing the ability to fix bugs or add new functions. Universities were early adopters of computing technology. Many of the modifications developed by universities were openly shared, in keeping with the academic principles of sharing knowledge, and organizations sprung up to facilitate sharing. As large-scale operating systems matured, fewer organizations allowed modifications to the operating software, and eventually such operating systems were closed to modification. However, utilities and other added-function applications are still shared and new organizations have been formed to promote the sharing of software.

The concept of free sharing of technological information existed long before computers. For example, in the early years of automobile development, one enterprise owned the rights to a 2-cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B. Selden.[1] By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands, or risk a lawsuit. In 1911, independent automaker Henry Ford won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden patent became virtually worthless and a new association (which would eventually become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) was formed.[1] The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all US auto manufacturers: although each company would develop technology and file patents, these patents were shared openly and without the exchange of money between all the manufacturers.[1] By the time the US entered World War 2, 92 Ford patents and 515 patents from other companies were being shared between these manufacturers, without any exchange of money (or lawsuits).[1][improper synthesis?]

In 1969 the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a transcontinental, high-speed computer network was constructed. The network (later succeeded by the Internet) simplified the exchange of software code.[2]

Some free software which was developed in the 1970s continues to be developed and used, such as TeX (developed by Donald Knuth)[7] and SPICE.[8]

Software was not considered copyrightable before the 1974 US Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) decided that "computer programs, to the extent that they embody an author's original creation, are proper subject matter of copyright."[9][10] Therefore, software had no licenses attached and was shared as public-domain software, typically with source code. The CONTU decision plus later court decisions such as Apple v. Franklin in 1983 for object code, gave computer programs the copyright status of literary works and started the licensing of software and the shrink-wrap closed source software business model.[11]

By the late 1960s change was coming: as operating systems and programming language compilers evolved, software production costs were dramatically increasing relative to hardware. A growing software industry was competing with the hardware manufacturers' bundled software products (the cost of bundled products was included in the hardware cost), leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers able to better meet their own needs[12] did not want the costs of manufacturer's software to be bundled with hardware product costs. In the United States vs. IBM antitrust suit, filed 17 January 1969, the U.S. government charged that bundled software was anticompetitive.[13] While some software continued to come at no cost, there was a growing amount of software that was for sale only under restrictive licenses.

In the early 1970s AT&T distributed early versions of Unix at no cost to government and academic researchers, but these versions did not come with permission to redistribute or to distribute modified versions, and were thus not free software in the modern meaning of the phrase. After Unix became more widespread in the early 1980s, AT&T stopped the free distribution and charged for system patches. As it is quite difficult to switch to another architecture, most researchers paid for a commercial license.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, computer vendors and software-only companies began routinely charging for software licenses, marketing software as "Program Products" and imposing legal restrictions on new software developments, now seen as assets, through copyrights, trademarks, and leasing contracts. In 1976 Bill Gates wrote an essay entitled Open Letter to Hobbyists, in which he expressed dismay at the widespread sharing of Microsoft's product Altair BASIC by hobbyists without paying its licensing fee. In 1979, AT&T began to enforce its licenses when the company decided it might profit by selling the Unix system.[14] In an announcement letter dated 8 February 1983 IBM inaugurated a policy of no longer distributing sources with purchased software.[15][16]

To increase revenues, a general trend began to no longer distribute source code (easily readable by programmers,) and only distribute the executable machine code that was compiled from the source code. One person especially distressed by this new practice was Richard Stallman. He was concerned that he could no longer study or further modify programs initially written by others. Stallman viewed this practice as ethically wrong. In response, he founded the GNU Project in 1983 so that people could use computers using only free software. He established a non-profit organization, the Free Software Foundation, in 1985, to more formally organize the project. He invented copyleft, a legal mechanism to preserve the “free” status of a work subject to copyright, and implemented this in the General Public License. Copyleft licenses allow authors to grant a number of rights to users (including rights to use a work without further charges, and rights to obtain, study and modify the program's complete corresponding source code) but requires derivatives to remain under the same license or one without any additional restrictions. Since derivatives include combinations with other original programs, downstream authors are prevented from turning the initial work into proprietary software, and invited to contribute to the copyleft commons.[2] Later, variations of such licenses were developed by others.

However, there were still those who wished to share their source code with other programmers and/or with users on a free basis, then called "hobbyists" and "hackers".[17] Before the introduction and widespread public use of the internet, there were several alternative ways available to do this, including listings in computer magazines (like Dr. Dobb's Journal, Creative Computing, SoftSide, Compute!, Byte, etc.) and in computer programming books, like the bestseller BASIC Computer Games.[18] Though still copyrighted, annotated source code for key components of Atari 8-bit family system software was published in mass market books, including The Atari BASIC Source Book[19] (full source for Atari BASIC) and Inside Atari DOS (full source for Atari DOS).[20]

The SHARE users group, founded in 1955, began collecting and distributing free software. The first documented distribution from SHARE was dated 17 October 1955.[21] The "SHARE Program Library Agency" (SPLA) distributed information and software, notably on magnetic tape.

In the early 1980s, the so-called DECUS tapes[22] were a worldwide system for transmission of free software for users of DEC equipment. Operating systems were usually proprietary software, but many tools like the TECO editor, Runoff text formatter, or List file listing utility, etc. were developed to make users' lives easier, and distributed on the DECUS tapes. These utility packages benefited DEC, which sometimes incorporated them into new releases of their proprietary operating system. Even compilers could be distributed and for example Ratfor (and Ratfiv) helped researchers to move from Fortran coding to structured programming (suppressing the GO TO statement). The 1981 Decus tape was probably the most innovative by bringing the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Software Tools Virtual Operating System which permitted users to use a Unix-like system on DEC 16-bit PDP-11s and 32-bit VAXes running under the VMS operating system. It was similar to the current cygwin system for Windows. Binaries and libraries were often distributed, but users usually preferred to compile from source code.[citation needed]

In the 80s, parallel to the free software movement, software with source code was shared on BBS networks. This was sometimes a necessity; software written in BASIC and other interpreted languages could only be distributed as source code, and much of it was freeware. When users began gathering such source code, and setting up boards specifically to discuss its modification, this was a de facto open-source system.

One of the most obvious examples of this is one of the most-used BBS systems and networks, WWIV, developed initially in BASIC by Wayne Bell. A culture of "modding" his software, and distributing the mods, grew up so extensively that when the software was ported to first Pascal, then C++, its source code continued to be distributed to registered users, who would share mods and compile their own versions of the software. This may have contributed to it being a dominant system and network, despite being outside the Fidonet umbrella that was shared by so many other BBS makers.

Meanwhile, the advent of Usenet and UUCPNet in the early 1980s further connected the programming community and provided a simpler way for programmers to share their software and contribute to software others had written.[23]

In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project to write a complete operating system free from constraints on use of its source code. Particular incidents that motivated this include a case where an annoying printer couldn't be fixed because the source code was withheld from users.[24] Stallman also published the GNU Manifesto in 1985 to outline the GNU Project's purpose and explain the importance of free software. Another probable inspiration for the GNU project and its manifesto was a disagreement between Stallman and Symbolics, Inc. over MIT's access to updates Symbolics had made to its Lisp machine, which was based on MIT code.[25] Soon after the launch, he[17] used[clarification needed] the existing term "free software" and founded the Free Software Foundation to promote the concept. The Free Software Definition was published in February 1986.

In 1989, the first version of the GNU General Public License was published.[26] A slightly updated version 2 was published in 1991. In 1989, some GNU developers formed the company Cygnus Solutions.[27] The GNU project's kernel, later called "GNU Hurd", was continually delayed, but most other components were completed by 1991. Some of these, especially the GNU Compiler Collection, had become market leaders[clarification needed] in their own right. The GNU Debugger and GNU Emacs were also notable successes.

The Linux kernel, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. The license wasn't a free software license, but with version 0.12 in February 1992, Torvalds relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License.[28] Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted attention from volunteer programmers.

Until this point, the GNU project's lack of a kernel meant that no complete free software operating systems existed. The development of Torvalds' kernel closed that last gap. The combination of the almost-finished GNU operating system and the Linux kernel made the first complete free software operating system.

Among Linux distributions, Debian GNU/Linux, begun by Ian Murdock in 1993, is noteworthy for being explicitly committed to the GNU and FSF principles of free software. The Debian developers' principles are expressed in the Debian Social Contract. Since its inception, the Debian project has been closely linked with the FSF, and in fact was sponsored by the FSF for a year in 1994â€“1995. In 1997, former Debian project leader Bruce Perens also helped found Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit funding and support organization for various free software projects.[29]

Since 1996, the Linux kernel has included proprietary licensed components, so that it was no longer entirely free software.[30] Therefore, the Free Software Foundation Latin America released in 2008 a modified version of the Linux-kernel called Linux-libre, where all proprietary and non-free components were removed.

Many businesses offer customized Linux-based products, or distributions, with commercial support. The naming remains controversial. Referring to the complete system as simply "Linux" is common usage. However, the Free Software Foundation, and many others,[citation needed] advocate the use of the term "GNU/Linux", saying that it is a more accurate name for the whole operating system.[31]

Linux adoption grew among businesses and governments in the 1990s and 2000s. In the English-speaking world at least, Ubuntu and its derivatives became a relatively popular group of Linux distributions.

When the USL v. BSDi lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993, FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD) were released as free software. In 1995, OpenBSD forked from NetBSD. In 2004, Dragonfly BSD forked from FreeBSD.

In the mid to late 90s, when many website-based companies were starting up, free software became a popular choice for web servers. The Apache HTTP Server became the most-used web-server software, a title that still holds as of 2015.[32] Systems based on a common "stack" of software with the Linux kernel at the base, Apache providing web services, the MySQL database engine for data storage, and the PHP programming language for providing dynamic pages, came to be termed LAMP systems. In actuality, the programming language that predated PHP and dominated the web in the mid and late 90's was Perl. Web forms were processed on the server side through Common Gateway Interface scripts written in Perl.

In 1997, Eric S. Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a reflective analysis of the hacker community and free software principles. The paper received significant attention in early 1998 and was one factor in motivating Netscape Communications Corporation to release their popular Netscape Communicator Internet suite as free software.[33]

Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring free software principles and benefits to the commercial-software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of the sharing of source code.[34]

The label "open source" was adopted by some people in the free software movement at a strategy session[35] held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator. The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested "open source", Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Michael Tiemann, and Eric S. Raymond. Over the next week, Raymond and others worked on spreading the word. Linus Torvalds gave an all-important sanction the following day. Phil Hughes offered a pulpit in Linux Journal. Richard Stallman, pioneer of the free software movement, flirted with adopting the term, but changed his mind.[35] Those people who adopted the term used the opportunity before the release of Navigator's source code to free themselves of the ideological and confrontational connotations of the term "free software". Netscape released its source code under the Netscape Public License and later under the Mozilla Public License.[36]

The term was given a big boost at an event organized in April 1998 by technology publisher Tim O'Reilly. Originally titled the "Freeware Summit" and later named the "Open Source Summit"[37], the event brought together the leaders of many of the most important free and open-source projects, including Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape, and Eric Raymond. At that meeting, the confusion caused by the name free software was brought up. Tiemann argued for "sourceware" as a new term, while Raymond argued for "open source". The assembled developers took a vote, and the winner was announced at a press conference that evening. Five days later, Raymond made the first public call to the free software community to adopt the new term.[38] The Open Source Initiative was formed shortly thereafter.[35] According to the OSI Richard Stallman initially flirted with the idea of adopting the open source term.[39] But as the enormous success of the open source term buried Stallman's free software term and his message on social values and computer users' freedom,[40][41][42] later Stallman and his FSF strongly objected the OSI's approach and terminology.[43] Due to the rejection of Stallman of the term open-source software, the FOSS ecosystem is being divided in its terminology, see also Alternative terms for free software. For example, a 2002 FOSS developer survey revealed that 32.6% associate themselves with OSS, 48% with free software, and 19.4% in between or undecided.[44] Stallman still maintained, however, that users of each term were allies in the fight against proprietary software.

On 13 October 2000, Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice office suite as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The free software version was renamed OpenOffice.org, and coexisted with StarOffice.

On the end of 1990s, the term "Open source" gained much traction in public media[45] and acceptance in software industry in context of the dotcom bubble and the open-source software driven Web 2.0.

The X Window System was created in 1984, and became the de facto standard window system in desktop free software operating systems by the mid-1990s. X runs as a server, and is responsible for communicating with graphics hardware on behalf of clients (which are individual software applications). It provides useful services such as having multiple virtual desktops for the same monitor, and transmitting visual data across the network so a desktop can be accessed remotely.

Initially, users or system administrators assembled their own environments from X and available window managers (which add standard controls to application windows; X itself does not do this), pagers, docks and other software. While X can be operated without a window manager, having one greatly increases convenience and ease of use.

Two key "heavyweight" desktop environments for free software operating systems emerged in the 1990s that were widely adopted: KDE and GNOME. KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich. At the time, he was troubled by the inconsistencies in the user interfaces of UNIX applications. He proposed a new desktop environment. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest.[46]

Ettrich chose to use the Qt toolkit for the KDE project. At the time, Qt did not use a free software license. Members of the GNU project became concerned with the use of such a toolkit for building a free software desktop environment. In August 1997, two projects were started in response to KDE: the Harmony toolkit (a free replacement for the Qt libraries) and GNOME (a different desktop without Qt and built entirely on top of free software).[47] GTK+ was chosen as the base of GNOME in place of the Qt toolkit.

In November 1998, the Qt toolkit was licensed under the free/open source Q Public License (QPL) but debate continued about compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL). In September 2000, Trolltech made the Unix version of the Qt libraries available under the GPL, in addition to the QPL, which has eliminated the concerns of the Free Software Foundation. KDE has since been split into KDE Plasma Workspaces, a desktop environment, and KDE Software Compilation, a much broader set of software that includes the desktop environment.

Both KDE and GNOME now participate in freedesktop.org, an effort launched in 2000 to standardize Unix desktop interoperability, although there is still competition between them.[48]

Since 2000, software written for X almost always uses some widget toolkit written on top of X, like Qt or GTK.[citation needed]

In 2010, Canonical released the first version of Unity, a replacement for the prior default desktop environment for Ubuntu, GNOME. This change to a new, under-development desktop environment and user interface was initially somewhat controversial among Ubuntu users.

In 2011, GNOME 3 was introduced, which largely discarded the desktop metaphor in favor of a more mobile-oriented interface. The ensuing controversy led Debian to consider making the Xfce environment default on Debian 7. Several independent projects were begun to keep maintaining the GNOME 2 code.

Fedora did not adopt Unity, retaining its existing offering of a choice of GNOME, KDE and LXDE with GNOME being the default, and hence Red Hat Enterprise Linux (for which Fedora acts as the "initial testing ground") did not adopt Unity either. A fork of Ubuntu was made by interested third-party developers that kept GNOME and discarded Unity. In March 2017, Ubuntu announced that it will be abandoning Unity in favour or GNOME 3 in future versions, and ceasing its efforts in developing Unity-based smartphones and tablets.[49][50]

When Google built the Linux-based Android operating system, mostly for phone and tablet devices, it replaced X with the purpose-built SurfaceFlinger.

Open-source developers also criticized X as obsolete, carrying many unused or overly complicated elements in its protocol and libraries, while missing modern functionality, e.g., compositing, screen savers, and functions provided by window managers.[51] Several attempts have been made or are underway to replace X for these reasons, including:

As free software became more popular, industry incumbents such as Microsoft started to see it as a serious threat. This was shown in a leaked 1998 document, confirmed by Microsoft as genuine, which came to be called the first of the Halloween Documents.

Microsoft once compared the GPL to "a cancer", but has since stopped using this analogy. Indeed, Microsoft has softened its public stance towards open source[citation needed] in general, in recognition of open source since becoming an important part of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem. However, at the same time, behind the scenes, Microsoft's actions have been less favourable toward the open-source community.

In 2006 Microsoft launched its CodePlex open source code hosting site, to provide hosting for open-source developers targeting Microsoft platforms. In July 2009 Microsoft even open sourced some Hyper-V-supporting patches to the Linux kernel, because they were required to do so by the GNU General Public License,[53][54] and contributed them to the mainline kernel. Note that Hyper-V itself is not open source. Microsoft's F# compiler, created in 2002, has also been released as open source under the Apache license. The F# compiler is a commercial product, as it has been incorporated into Microsoft Visual Studio, which is not open source.

Microsoft representatives have made regular appearances at various open source and Linux conferences for many years.

In 2012, Microsoft launched a subsidiary named Microsoft Open Technologies Inc., with the aim of bridging the gap between proprietary Microsoft technologies and non-Microsoft technologies by engaging with open-source standards.[55] This subsidiary was subsequently folded back into Microsoft as Microsoft's position on open source and non-Windows platforms became more favourable.

In January 2016 Microsoft released Chakra as open source under MIT License, the code is available on GitHub.[56]

In 2003, a proprietary Unix vendor and former Linux distribution vendor called SCO alleged that Unix intellectual property had been inappropriately copied into the Linux kernel, and sued IBM, claiming that it bore responsibility for this. Several related lawsuits and countersuits followed, some originating from SCO, some from others suing SCO. However, SCO's allegations lacked specificity, and while some in the media reported them as credible, many critics of SCO believed the allegations to be highly dubious at best.

Over the course of the SCO v IBM case, it emerged that not only had SCO been distributing the Linux kernel for years under the GPL, and continued to do so (thus rendering any claims hard to sustain legally), but that SCO did not even own the copyrights to much of the Unix code that it asserted copyright over, and had no right to sue over them on behalf of the presumed owner, Novell.

This was despite SCO's CEO, Darl McBride, having made many wild and damaging claims of inappropriate appropriation to the media, many of which were later shown to be false, or legally irrelevant even if true.

The blog Groklaw was one of the most forensic examiners of SCO's claims and related events, and gained its popularity from covering this material for many years.

SCO suffered defeat after defeat in SCO v IBM and its various other court cases, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2007. However, despite the courts finding that SCO did not own the copyrights (see above), and SCO's lawsuit-happy CEO Darl McBride no longer running the company, the bankruptcy trustee in charge of SCO-in-bankruptcy decided to press on with some portions he claimed remained relevant in the SCO v IBM lawsuit. He could apparently afford to do this because SCO's main law firm in SCO v IBM had signed an agreement at the outset to represent SCO for a fixed amount of money no matter how long the case took to complete.

In 2004, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI) announced its intent to publish a book, Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code, showing that the Linux kernel was based on code stolen from Unix, in essence using the argument that it was impossible to believe that Linus Torvalds could produce something as sophisticated as the Linux kernel. The book was never published, after it was widely criticised and ridiculed, including by people supposedly interviewed for the book. It emerged that some of the people were never interviewed, and that ADTI had not tried to contact Linus Torvalds, or ever put the allegations to him to allow a response. Microsoft attempted to draw a line under this incident, stating that it was a "distraction".

Many suspected that some or all of these legal and fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) attacks against the Linux kernel were covertly arranged by Microsoft, although this has never been proven. Both ADTI and SCO, however, received funding from Microsoft.

In 2004 the European Commission found Microsoft guilty of anti-competitive behaviour with respect to interoperability in the workgroup software market. Microsoft had formerly settled United States v. Microsoft in 2001, in a case which charged that it illegally abused its monopoly power to force computer manufacturers to preinstall Internet Explorer.

The Commission demanded that Microsoft produce full documentation of its workgroup protocols to allow competitors to interoperate with its workgroup software, and imposed fines of 1.5 million euros per day for Microsoft's failure to comply. The Commission had jurisdiction because Microsoft sells the software in question in Europe.

Microsoft, after a failed attempt to appeal the decision through the European court system, eventually complied with the demand, producing volumes of detailed documentation.

The Samba project, as Microsoft's sole remaining competitor in the workgroup software market, was the key beneficiary of this documentation.

In 2008 the International Organization for Standardization published Microsoft's Office Open XML as an international standard, which crucially meant that it, and therefore Microsoft Office, could be used in projects where the use of open standards were mandated by law or by policy. Critics of the standardisation process, including some members of ISO national committees involved in the process itself, alleged irregularities and procedural violations in the process, and argued that the ISO should not have approved OOXML as a standard because it made reference to undocumented Microsoft Office behaviour.

As of 2012[update], no correct open-source implementation of OOXML exists, which validates the critics' remarks about OOXML being difficult to implement and underspecified. Presently, Google cannot yet convert Office documents into its own proprietary Google Docs format correctly. This suggests that OOXML is not a true open standard, but rather a partial document describing what Microsoft Office does, and only involving certain file formats.

The vast majority of programming languages in use today have a free software implementation available.

Since the 1990s, the release of major new programming languages in the form of open-source compilers and/or interpreters has been the norm, rather than the exception. Examples include Python in 1991, Ruby in 1995, and Scala in 2003. In recent times, the most notable exceptions have been Java, ActionScript, C#, and Apple's Swift until version 2.2 was proprietary. Partly compatible open-source implementations have been developed for most, and in the case of Java, the main open-source implementation is by now very close to the commercial version.

Since its first public release in 1996, the Java platform had not been open source, although the Java source code portion of the Java runtime was included in Java Development Kits (JDKs), on a purportedly "confidential" basis, despite it being freely downloadable by the general public in most countries. Sun later expanded this "confidential" source code access to include the full source code of the Java Runtime Environment via a separate program which was open to members of the public, and later made the source of the Java compiler javac available also. Sun also made the JDK source code available confidentially to the Blackdown Java project, which was a collection of volunteers who ported early versions of the JDK to Linux, or improved on Sun's Linux ports of the JDK. However, none of this was open source, because modification and redistribution without Sun's permission were forbidden in all cases. Sun stated at the time that they were concerned about preventing forking of the Java platform.

However, several independent partial reimplementations of the Java platform had been created, many of them by the open-source community, such as the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ). Sun never filed lawsuits against any of the open source clone projects. GCJ notably caused a bad user experience for Java on free software supporting distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu which shipped GCJ at the time as their Java implementation. How to replace GCJ with the Sun JDK was a frequently asked question by users, because GCJ was an incomplete implementation, incompatible and buggy.

In 2006 Jonathan I. Schwartz became CEO of Sun Microsystems, and signalled his commitment to open source. On 8 May 2007, Sun Microsystems released the Java Development Kit as OpenJDK under the GNU General Public License. Part of the class library (4%) could not be released as open source due to them being licensed from other parties and were included as binary plugs.[citation needed] Because of this, in June 2007, Red Hat launched IcedTea to resolve the encumbered components with the equivalents from GNU Classpath implementation. Since the release, most of the encumbrances have been solved, leaving only the audio engine code and colour management system (the latter is to be resolved using Little CMS).

The first open-source distributed revision control system (DVCS) was 'tla' in 2001 (since renamed to GNU arch); however, it and its successors 'baz' and 'bzr' (Bazaar) never became very popular, and GNU arch was discontinued, although Bazaar still continues and is used by Canonical.

However, other DVCS projects sprung up, and some started to get significant adoption.

Git, which has since become the most popular DVCS, was created in 2005.[57] The story of its creation is an unusual one. Some developers of the Linux Kernel started to use a proprietary DVCS called BitKeeper, notably Linux founder Linus Torvalds, although some other kernel developers never used it due to its proprietary nature. The unusual situation whereby Linux kernel development involved the use by some of proprietary software "came to a head" when Andrew Tridgell started to reverse-engineer BitKeeper with the aim of producing an open-source tool which could provide some of the same functionality as the commercial version. BitMover, the company that developed BitKeeper, in response, in 2005 revoked the special free of-charge license it had granted to certain kernel developers.

As a result of the removal of the BitKeeper license, Linus Torvalds immediately decided to write his own DVCS, called git, because he thought none of the existing open-source DVCSs were suitable for his particular needs as a kernel maintainer (which was why he had adopted BitKeeper in the first place). A number of other developers quickly jumped in and helped him, and git over time grew from a relatively simple "stupid content tracker" (on which some developers developed "porcelain" extensions) into the sophisticated and powerful DVCS that it is today. Torvalds no longer maintains git himself, however; it has been maintained by Junio Hamano for many years, and has continued receiving contributions from many developers.

The increasing popularity of open-source DVCSs such as git, and then, later, DVCS hosting sites, the most popular of which is GitHub (founded 2008), incrementally reduced the barriers to participation in free software projects still further. With sites like GitHub, no longer did potential contributors have to do things like hunt for the URL for the source code repository (which could be in different places on each website, or sometimes tucked away in a README file or developer documentation), or work out how to generate a patch, and if necessary subscribe to the right mailing list so that their patch email would get to the right people. Contributors can simply fork their own copy of a repository with one click, and issue a pull request from the appropriate branch when their changes are ready. GitHub has become the most popular hosting site in the world for open-source software, and this, together with the ease of forking and the visibility of forks has made it a popular way for contributors to make changes, large and small.

While copyright is the primary legal mechanism that FOSS authors use to ensure license compliance for their software, other mechanisms such as legislation, software patents, and trademarks have uses also. In response to legal issues with patents and the DMCA, the Free Software Foundation released version 3 of its GNU Public License in 2007 that explicitly addressed the DMCA's digital rights management (DRM) provisions and patent rights.

After the development of the GNU GPLv3, as copyright holder of many pieces of the GNU system, such as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) software, the FSF updated most[citation needed] of the GNU programs' licenses from GPLv2 to GPLv3. Apple, a user of GCC, and a heavy user of both DRM and patents decided to switch the compiler in its Xcode IDE from GCC to Clang, another FOSS compiler,[58] but which is under a permissive license.[59] LWN speculated that Apple was motivated partly by a desire to avoid GPLv3.[58] The Samba project also switched to GPLv3, which Apple replaced in their software suite with a closed-source, proprietary software alternative.[60]

Recent mergers have affected major open-source software. Sun Microsystems (Sun) acquired MySQL AB, owner of the popular open-source MySQL database, in 2008.[61]

Oracle in turn purchased Sun in January, 2010, acquiring their copyrights, patents, and trademarks. This made Oracle the owner of the most popular proprietary database and the most popular open-source database (MySQL)[citation needed]. Oracle's attempts to commercialize the open-source MySQL database have raised concerns in the FOSS community.[62] Partly in response to uncertainty about the future of MySQL, the FOSS community forked the project into new database systems outside of Oracle's control. These include MariaDB, Percona, and Drizzle.[63] All of these have distinct names; they are distinct projects and cannot use the trademarked name MySQL.[64]

In September 2008, Google released the first version of Android, a new smartphone operating system, as open source (some Google applications that are sometimes but not always bundled with Android are not open source). Initially, the operating system was given away for free by Google, and was eagerly adopted by many handset makers; Google later bought Motorola Mobility and produced its own "vanilla" Android phones and tablets, while continuing to allow other manufacturers to use Android. Android is now the world's most popular mobile platform.[65]

Because Android is based on the Linux kernel, this means that Linux is now the dominant kernel on both mobile platforms (via Android), and supercomputers,[66] and a key player in server operating systems too.

In August 2010, Oracle sued Google claiming that its use of Java in Android infringed on Oracle's copyrights and patents. The initial Oracle v. Google trial ended in May 2012, with the finding that Google did not infringe on Oracle's patents, and the trial judge ruled that the structure of the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) used by Google was not copyrightable. The jury found that Google made a trivial ("de minimis") copyright infringement, but the parties stipulated that Google would pay no damages, because it was so trivial.[67] However, Oracle appealed to the Federal Circuit, and Google filed a cross-appeal on the literal copying claim.[68] The Federal Circuit ruled that the small copyright infringement acknowledged by Google was not de minimis, and sent the fair use issue back to the trial judge for reconsideration. In 2016, the case was retried and a jury found for Google, on the grounds of fair use.

Until recently, Linux was still a relatively uncommon choice of operating system for desktops and laptops. However, Google's Chromebooks, running Chrome OS which is essentially a web thin client, have captured 20-25% of the sub-$300 US laptop market.[69] Chrome OS is built from the open-source Chromium OS, which is based on Linux, in much the same way that versions of Android shipped on commercially available phones are built from the open source version of Android.


who drew up the missouri compromise in 1820

When free-soil Maine offered its petition for statehood, the Senate quickly linked the Maine and Missouri bills, making Maine admission a condition for Missouri entering the Union with slavery unrestricted. Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois added a compromise proviso, excluding slavery from all remaining lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36Â° 30' parallel. The combined measures passed the Senate, only to be voted down in the House by those Northern representatives who held out for a free Missouri. Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, in a desperate bid to break the deadlock, divided the Senate bills. Clay and his pro-compromise allies succeeded in pressuring half the anti-restrictionist House Southerners to submit to the passage of the Thomas proviso, while maneuvering a number of restrictionist House northerners to acquiesce in supporting Missouri as a slave state.[3][4] The Missouri question in the 15th Congress ended in stalemate on March 4, 1819, the House sustaining its northern antislavery position, and the Senate blocking a slavery restricted statehood.

Missouri Compromise

The Missouri Compromise is the title generally attached to the legislation passed by the 16th United States Congress on May 8, 1820. The measures provided for the admission of Maine as a state along with Missouri as a slave state, thus maintaining the balance of power between North and South. As part of the compromise, slavery was prohibited North of the 36°30′ parallel, excluding Missouri. President James Monroe signed the legislation on April 6, 1820.[1]

Earlier, on February 3, 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Jeffersonian Republican from New York, submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood, which included restrictions on slavery. Southerners objected to any bill which imposed federal restrictions on slavery, believing that slavery was a state issue settled by the Constitution. However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri would give the South an advantage. Northern critics including Federalists and Republicans objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government, derived from a states' slave population. Jeffersonian Republicans in the North ardently maintained that a strict interpretation of the Constitution required that Congress act to limit the spread of slavery on egalitarian grounds.[2]

The Missouri Compromise was controversial at the time, as many worried over the country being now lawfully divided along sectional lines. The bill was effectively repealed in the Kansas–Nebraska Act, and declared unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sandford. This increased tensions over slavery and eventually led to the Civil War.

The Era of Good Feelings, closely associated with the administration of President James Monroe (1817â€“1825), was characterized by the dissolution of national political identities.[6][7] With the discredited Federalists in decline nationally, the "amalgamated" or hybridized Republicans adopted key Federalist economic programs and institutions, further erasing party identities and consolidating their victory.[8][9]

The economic nationalism of the Era of Good Feelings that would authorize the Tariff of 1816 and incorporate the Second Bank of the United States portended an abandonment of the Jeffersonian political formula for strict construction of the constitution, a limited central government and commitments to the primacy of Southern agrarian interests.[10][11] The end of opposition parties also meant the end of party discipline and the means to suppress internecine factional animosities. Rather than produce political harmony, as President James Monroe had hoped, amalgamation had led to intense rivalries among Jeffersonian Republicans.[12]

It was amid the "good feelings" of this period – during which Republican Party discipline was in abeyance – that the Tallmadge Amendment surfaced.[13]

The immense Louisiana Purchase territories had been acquired through federal executive action, followed by Republican legislative authorization in 1803 during the Thomas Jefferson administration.[14]

Prior to its purchase in 1803, the governments of Spain and France had sanctioned slavery in the region. In 1812, the state of Louisiana, a major cotton producer and the first to be carved from the Louisiana Purchase, had entered the Union as a slave state. Predictably, Missourians were adamant that slave labor should not be molested by the federal government.[15] In the years following the War of 1812, the region, now known as Missouri Territory, experienced rapid settlement, led by slaveholding planters.[16]

Agriculturally, the land comprising the lower reaches of the Missouri River, from which that new state would be formed, had no prospects as a major cotton producer. Suited for diversified farming, the only crop regarded as promising for slave labor was hemp culture. On that basis, southern planters immigrated with their chattel to Missouri, the slave population rising from 3,000 in 1810 to 10,000 in 1820. In a total population 66,000, slaves represented about 15 percent.[17]

By 1818, the population of Missouri territory was approaching the threshold that would qualify it for statehood. An enabling act was provided to Congress empowering territorial residents to select convention delegates and draft a state constitution.[18] The admission of Missouri territory as a slave state was expected to be more or less routine.[19][20]

When the Missouri statehood bill was opened for debate in the House of Representative on February 13, 1819, early exchanges on the floor proceeded without serious incident.[21]

In the course of these proceedings, Representative James Tallmadge Jr. of New York "tossed a bombshell into the Era of Good Feelings" with the following amendments:[22]

Provided, that the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been fully convicted; and that all children born within the said State will be executed after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.[23]

A political outsider, the 41-year old Tallmadge conceived his amendment based on a personal aversion to slavery. He had played a leading role in accelerating emancipation of the remaining slaves in New York in 1817. Moreover, he had campaigned against Illinois' Black Codes: though ostensibly free-soil, the new Illinois state constitution permitted indentured servitude and a limited form of slavery.[24][25] As a New York Republican, Tallmadge maintained an uneasy association with Governor DeWitt Clinton, a former Republican who depended on support from ex-Federalists. Clinton's faction was hostile to Tallmadge for his spirited defense of General Andrew Jackson over his contentious invasion of Florida.[26][27]

Tallmadge had backing from a fellow New York Republican, Congressman John W. Taylor (not to be confused with legislator John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia). Taylor also had antislavery credentials: In February, 1819, he had proposed similar slave restrictions on Arkansas territory in the House, but failed 89-87. He would lead the pro-Tallmadge antislavery forces during the 16th Congress in 1820.[28]

The amendment instantly exposed the polarization among Jeffersonian Republicans over the future of slavery in the nation.[29][30] Northern Jeffersonian Republicans formed a coalition across factional lines with remnants of the Federalists. Southern Jeffersonian united in almost unanimous opposition. The ensuing debates pitted the northern "restrictionists" (antislavery legislators who wished to bar slavery from the Louisiana territories) and southern "anti-restrictionists" (proslavery legislators who rejected any interference by Congress inhibiting slavery expansion).[31]

The sectional "rupture" over slavery among Jeffersonian Republicans, first exposed in the Missouri crisis, had its roots in the Revolutionary generation.[32]

The Missouri crisis marked a rupture in the Republican Ascendency â€“ the national association of Jeffersonian Republicans that dominated national politics in the post-War of 1812 period.[34]

The Founders had inserted both principled and pragmatic elements in the establishing documents. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was grounded on the claim that liberty established a moral ideal that made universal equality a common right.[35] The Revolutionary War generation had formed a government of limited powers in 1787 to embody the principles in the Declaration, but "burdened with the one legacy that defied that principles of 1776": human bondage.[36] In a pragmatic commitment to form the Union, the federal apparatus would forego any authority to directly interfere with the institution of slavery where it existed under local control within the states. This acknowledgment of state sovereignty provided for the participation of those states most committed to slave labor. With this understanding, slaveholders had cooperated in authorizing the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, and to outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808.[37] Though the Founders sanctioned slavery, they did so with the implicit understanding that the slaveholding states would take steps to relinquish the institution as opportunities arose.[38]

Southern states, after the War for Independence, had regarded slavery as an institution in decline (with the exception of Georgia and South Carolina). This was manifest in the shift towards diversified farming in the Upper South, and in the gradual emancipation of slaves in New England, and more significantly, in the mid-Atlantic states. Beginning in the 1790s, with the introduction of the cotton gin, and by 1815, with the vast increase in demand for cotton internationally, slave-based agriculture underwent an immense revival, spreading the institution westward to the Mississippi River. Slavery opponents in the South vacillated, as did their hopes for the imminent demise of human bondage.[39]

However rancorous the disputes among Southerners themselves over the virtues of a slave-based society, they united as a section when confronted by external challenges to their institution. The free states were not to meddle in the affairs of the slaveholders. Southern leaders – of whom virtually all identified as Jeffersonian Republicans – denied that Northerners had any business encroaching on matters related to slavery. Northern attacks on the institution were condemned as incitements to riot among the slave populations – deemed a dire threat to white southern security.[40][41]

Northern Jeffersonian Republicans embraced the Jeffersionian antislavery legacy during the Missouri debates, explicitly citing the Declaration of Independence as an argument against expanding the institution. Southern leaders, seeking to defend slavery, would renounce the document's universal egalitarian applications and its declaration that "all men are created equal."[42]

Article One, Section Two of the US Constitution supplemented legislative representation in those states where residents owned slaves. Known as the three-fifths clause or the "federal ratio", three-fifths (60%) of the slave population was numerically added to the free population. This sum was used to calculate Congressional districts per state, and the number of delegates to the Electoral College. The federal ratio produced a significant number of legislative victories for the South in the years preceding the Missouri crisis, as well as augmenting its influence in party caucuses, the appointment of judges and the distribution of patronage. It is unlikely that the three-fifths clause, prior to 1820, was decisive in affecting legislation on slavery. Indeed, with the rising northern representation in the House, the South's share of the membership had declined since the 1790s.[43][44]

Hostility to the federal ratio had historically been the object of the now nationally ineffectual Federalists; they blamed their collective decline on the "Virginia Dynasty", expressed in partisan terms rather than in moral condemnation of slavery. The pro-De Witt Clinton-Federalist faction carried on the tradition, posing as antirestrictionists, for the purpose of advancing their fortunes in New York politics.[45][46]

Senator Rufus King of New York, a Clinton associate, was the last Federalist icon still active on the national stage, a fact irksome to Southern Republicans.[47] A signatory to the US Constitution, he had strongly opposed the three-fifths rule in 1787. In the 1819 15th Congress debates, he revived his critique as a complaint that New England and Mid-Atlantic States suffered unduly from the federal ratio, declaring himself "degraded" (politically inferior) to the slaveholders. Federalists, North and South, preferred to mute antislavery rhetoric, but during the 1820 debates in the 16th Congress, King and other old Federalists would expand their critique to include moral considerations of slavery.[48][49]

Republican James Tallmadge, Jr. and the Missouri restrictionists deplored the three-fifths clause because it had translated into political supremacy for the South. They had no agenda to remove it from the founding document, only to prevent its further application west of the Mississippi River.[50][51]

As determined as Southern Republicans were to secure Missouri statehood with slavery, the three-fifths clause failed to provide the margin of victory in the 15th Congress. Blocked by Northern Republicans – largely on egalitarian grounds – with sectional support from Federalists, the bill would die in the upper house, where the federal ratio had no relevance. The "balance of power" between the sections, and the maintenance of Southern preeminence on matters related to slavery resided in the Senate.[52][53]

Northern voting majorities in the lower house did not translate into political dominance. The fulcrum for proslavery forces resided in the upper house of Congress. There, constitutional compromise in 1787 had provided for exactly two senators per state, regardless of its population: the South, with its small white demographic relative to the North, benefited from this arrangement. Since 1815, sectional parity in the Senate had been achieved through paired admissions, leaving the North and South, at the time of Missouri territory application for statehood, at eleven states each.[54]

The South, voting as a bloc on measures that challenged slaveholding interests and augmented by defections from Free State Senators with Southern sympathies, was able to tally majorities. The Senate stood as the bulwark and source of the Slave Power â€“ a power that required admission of slave states to the Union to preserve its national primacy.[55][56]

Missouri statehood, with the Tallmadge amendment approved, would set a trajectory towards a Free State trans-Mississippi and a decline in Southern political authority. The question as to whether the Congress could lawfully restrain the growth of slavery in Missouri took on great importance among the slave states. The moral dimensions of the expansion of human bondage would be raised by Northern Republicans on constitutional grounds.[57][58]

The Tallmadge amendment was "the first serious challenge to the extension of slavery" and raised questions concerning the interpretation of the republics' founding documents.[59]

Jeffersonian Republicans justified Tallmadge's slavery restrictions on the grounds that Congress possessed the authority to impose territorial statutes which would remain in force after statehood was established. Representative John W. Taylor pointed to Indiana and Illinois, where their Free State status conformed to the antislavery provisions in the Northwest Ordinance. [60]

Further, antislavery legislators invoked Article Four, Section Four of the Constitution, which required that states provide a republican form of government. As the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States in 1787, they argued, introducing slavery into Missouri would thwart the egalitarian intent of the Founders.[61][62]

Proslavery Republicans countered that the Constitution had long been interpreted as having relinquished any claim to restricting slavery within the states. The free inhabitants of Missouri, either in the territorial phase or during statehood, had the right to establish slavery – or disestablish it – exclusive of central government interference. As to the Northwest Ordinance, Southerners denied that this could serve as a lawful antecedent for the territories of the Louisiana Purchase, as the ordinance had been issued originally under the Articles of Confederation, not under the US Constitution.[63]

As a legal precedent, they offered the treaty acquiring the Louisiana lands in 1803: the document included a provision (Article 3) that extended the rights of US citizens to all inhabitants of the new territory, including the protection of property in slaves.[63] When slaveholders embraced Jeffersonian constitutional strictures on a limited central government they were reminded that Jefferson, as US President in 1803, had deviated from these precepts when he wielded federal executive power to double the size the United States (including the lands under consideration for Missouri statehood). In doing so, he set a Constitutional precedent that would serve to rationalize Tallmadge's federally imposed slavery restrictions.[64]

The 15th Congress debates, focusing at it did on constitutional questions, largely avoided the moral dimensions raised by the topic of slavery. That the unmentionable subject had been raised publicly was deeply offensive to Southern Congressmen, and violated the long-held sectional understanding between free and slave state legislators.[65]

Missouri statehood confronted Southern Jeffersonians with the prospect of applying the egalitarian principles espoused by the Revolutionary generation. This would require halting the spread of slavery westward, and confining the institution to where it already existed. Faced with a population of 1.5 million slaves, and the lucrative production of cotton, the South would abandon hopes for containment. Slaveholders in the 16th Congress, in an effort to come to grips with this paradox, would resort to a theory that called for extending slavery geographically so as to encourage its decline: "diffusion".[66][67]

On February 16, 1819, the House Committee of the Whole voted to link Tallmadge's provisions with the Missouri enabling legislation, approving the move 79-67.[68][69] Following the committee vote, debates resumed over the merits of each of Tallmadge's provisions in the enabling act. The debates in the House's 2nd session in 1819 lasted only three days. They have been characterized as "rancorous", "fiery", "bitter", "blistering", "furious" and "bloodthirsty".[70]

Northern representatives outnumbered the South in House membership 105 to 81. When each of the restrictionist provisions were put to the vote, they passed along sectional lines: 87 to 76 in favor of prohibition on further slave migration into Missouri (Table 1) and 82 to 78 in favor of emancipating slave offspring at age twenty-five.[71][72]

15th Congress 2nd Session, February 16, 1819.

The enabling bill was passed to the Senate, where both parts of the bill were rejected: 22 to 16 opposed to restricting new slaves in Missouri (supported by five northerners, two of whom were the proslavery legislators from the free state of Illinois); and 31 to 7 against gradual emancipation for slave children born post-statehood.[73] House antislavery restrictionists refused to concur with the Senate proslavery anti-restrictionists: Missouri statehood would devolve upon the 16th Congress in December 1819.[74][75]

The Missouri Compromise debates stirred suspicions among proslavery interests that the underlying purpose of the Tallmadge amendments had little to do with opposition to slavery expansion. The accusation was first leveled in the House by the Republican anti-restrictionist John Holmes from the District of Maine. He suggested that Senator Rufus King's "warm" support for the Tallmadge amendment concealed a conspiracy to organize a new antislavery party in the North – a party composed of old Federalists in combination with disaffected antislavery Republicans. The fact that King, in the Senate, and Tallmadge and Tyler, in the House – all New Yorkers – were among the vanguard for slavery restriction in Missouri lent credibility to these charges. When King was re-elected to the US Senate in January 1820, during the 16th Congress debates, and with bipartisan support, suspicions deepened and would persist throughout the crisis.[76][77] Southern Jeffersonian Republican leadership, including President Monroe and former President Thomas Jefferson considered it as an article of faith that Federalists, given the chance, would destabilize the Union so as to re-impose monarchal rule in North America, and "consolidate" political control over the people by expanding the functions of the central government. Jefferson, at first unperturbed by the Missouri question, soon became convinced that a northern conspiracy was afoot, with Federalists and crypto-Federalists posing as Republicans, using Missouri statehood as a pretext.[78]

Due to the disarray of the Republican Ascendency brought about by amalgamation, fears abounded among Southerners that a Free State party might take shape in the event that Congress fail to reach an understanding over Missouri and slavery: Such a party would threaten Southern preeminence. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts surmised that the political configuration for just such a sectional party already existed.[79][80] That the Federalists were anxious to regain a measure of political participation in national politics is indisputable. There was no basis, however, for the charge that Federalists had directed Tallmadge in his antislavery measures, nor was there anything to indicate that a New York-based King-Clinton alliance sought to erect an antislavery party on the ruins of the Republican Party. The allegations by Southern proslavery interests of a "plot" or that of "consolidation" as a threat to the Union misapprehended the forces at work in the Missouri crisis: the core of the opposition to slavery in the Louisiana Purchase were informed by Jeffersonian egalitarian principles, not a Federalist resurgence.[81][82]

To balance the number of "slave states" and "free states," the northern region of what was then Massachusetts, the District of Maine, ultimately gained admission into the United States as a free state to become Maine. This only occurred as a result of a compromise involving slavery in Missouri, and in the federal territories of the American west.[83] The admission of another slave state would increase the South's power at a time when northern politicians had already begun to regret the Constitution's Three-Fifths Compromise. Although more than 60 percent of whites in the United States lived in the North, by 1818 northern representatives held only a slim majority of congressional seats. The additional political representation allotted to the South as a result of the Three-Fifths Compromise gave southerners more seats in the House of Representatives than they would have had if the number was based on just free population. Moreover, since each state had two Senate seats, Missouri's admission as a slave state would result in more southern than northern senators.[84] A bill to enable the people of the Missouri Territory to draft a constitution and form a government preliminary to admission into the Union came before the House of Representatives in Committee of the Whole, on February 13, 1819. James Tallmadge of New York offered an amendment, named the Tallmadge Amendment, that forbade further introduction of slaves into Missouri, and mandated that all children of slave parents born in the state after its admission should be free at the age of 25. The committee adopted the measure and incorporated it into the bill as finally passed on February 17, 1819, by the house. The United States Senate refused to concur with the amendment, and the whole measure was lost.[85][86]

During the following session (1819â€“1820), the House passed a similar bill with an amendment, introduced on January 26, 1820, by John W. Taylor of New York, allowing Missouri into the union as a slave state. The question had been complicated by the admission in December of Alabama, a slave state, making the number of slave and free states equal. In addition, there was a bill in passage through the House (January 3, 1820) to admit Maine as a free state.[87]

The Senate decided to connect the two measures. It passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, excluding slavery from the Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north (the southern boundary of Missouri), except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri.[88]

The vote in the Senate was 24 for the compromise, to 20 against. The amendment and the bill passed in the Senate on February 17 and February 18, 1820.[88] The House then approved the Senate compromise amendment, on a vote of 90 to 87, with those 87 votes coming from free state representatives opposed to slavery in the new state of Missouri.[88] The House then approved the whole bill, 134 to 42, with opposition from the southern states.[88]

The two houses were at odds not only on the issue of the legality of slavery, but also on the parliamentary question of the inclusion of Maine and Missouri within the same bill. The committee recommended the enactment of two laws, one for the admission of Maine, the other an enabling act for Missouri. They recommended against having restrictions on slavery but for including the Thomas amendment. Both houses agreed, and the measures were passed on March 5, 1820, and were signed by President James Monroe on March 6.

The question of the final admission of Missouri came up during the session of 1820â€“1821. The struggle was revived over a clause in Missouri's new constitution (written in 1820) requiring the exclusion of "free negroes and mulattoes" from the state. Through the influence of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay "The Great Compromiser", an act of admission was finally passed, upon the condition that the exclusionary clause of the Missouri constitution should "never be construed to authorize the passage of any law" impairing the privileges and immunities of any U.S. citizen. This deliberately ambiguous provision is sometimes known as the Second Missouri Compromise.[89]

During the decades following 1820, Americans hailed the 1820 agreement as an essential compromise almost on the sacred level of the Constitution itself.[90] Although the Civil War broke out in 1861, historians often say the Compromise helped postpone the war.[91]

These disputes involved the competition between the southern and northern states for power in Congress and for control over future territories. There were also the same factions emerging as the Democratic-Republican party began to lose its coherence.

In an April 22 letter to John Holmes, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union:[92]

...but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.[93][94]

Congress' consideration of Missouri's admission also raised the issue of sectional balance, for the country was equally divided between slave and free states with eleven each. To admit Missouri as a slave state would tip the balance in the Senate (made up of two senators per state) in favor of the slave states. For this reason, northern states wanted Maine admitted as a free state.

On the constitutional side, the Compromise of 1820 was important as the example of Congressional exclusion of slavery from U.S. territory acquired since the Northwest Ordinance.

Following Maine's 1820[95] and Missouri's 1821[96] admissions to the Union, no other states were admitted until 1836, when Arkansas was admitted.[97]

The Compromise was deeply disappointing to African-Americans in both the North and South. It stopped the southern progression of gradual emancipation at Missouri's southern border and legitimized slavery as a southern institution.[98]

The provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north were effectively repealed by Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. The repeal of the Compromise caused outrage in the North and sparked the return to politics of Abraham Lincoln,[99] who criticized slavery and excoriated Douglas's act in his "Peoria Speech" (October 16, 1854).[100]