The history of open source has already been written and rewritten a couple of times, so there’s no need to go back to Genesis chapter one and revisit Linus Torvalds’ “just a hobby, won’t be big” comments too often.
But open source became more than the sum of its parts and the hobbyists grew successful in domains that traditionally belonged to their proprietary relatives.
Historical Note: If you do still want the history of open source, then the YouTube hosted Revolution OS is about 100 minutes of the best open development commentary you will find.
Source: Open Source