I've been always interested, out of the pure self-amusement, in the history of open software used today:

• who were the people which started it and what were the reasons to start
• what were design decisions at the start
• how software evolved over the time

Specifically, I'm interested in following software:

• GCC
• X
• Linux kernel
• Java

Of course, there is plenty of information in Internet to google for, but I thought it would be nice to have list of interesting resources at this site.

I hope some of visitors of this site have similar interest and can share a link or two they found particularly amusing/interesting.

To make this entry more question-like, here's straight question: what are the most interesting/amusing links about history of open source software?