What Is Linux?

Linus Tosvald was, in 1991, a student in Finland studying Computer programming at university. Obviously using a UNIX system (probably BSD). He went home, as millions did, to their PC, and wondered why it didn't do the same things as the big computers at uni did.He got bored of MS-DOS after 10 minutes, and decided to start his own kernel, which is the code at the heart of every operating system, that addresses the hardware directly. He wanted it to be free to distribute. He finished the first Linux kernel in mid 1991. He had the 32 bit kernel, in which programs could be run under, but he didn't have any software to run on it. Luckily, an ex-student in the USA, by the name of Richard Stallman had created a team of programmers devoted to free software, he called this the Free Software Foundation, who believed in making software free to distribute, and free to obtain the source code along with it.

The GNU GPL (General Public License) that the Free Software Foundation (or FSF) made also stated that the authors of the software could charge for the software, as long as they are willing for it to be freely distributed. This is the way that the GNU (stand's for GNU's Not Unix) and all software under the GNU GPL would create (hopefully) a profit.Stallman had been busy making a whole suite of software, for example: an editor called emacs, which is very popular today, and the bash (Bourne Again Shell), a command line interface based upon the original Bourne Shell, that comes with the BSD variant of UNIX. the FSF's software was entirely based upon the UNIX software suite, and essentially improved on it. The FSF were missing by 1991, only one really vital piece of software, to make it a fully fledged operating system: The Kernel Linus and Stallman got together, put their code together, and Linux, or GNU/Linux (as it's properly named) was made.

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