History of Linux
Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel.
Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments,[1] under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.
[2]: 7 [3][4] After AT&T had dropped out of the Multics project, the Unix operating system was conceived and implemented by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (both of AT&T Bell Laboratories) in 1969 and first released in 1970.
Since BSD contained Unix code that AT&T owned, AT&T filed a lawsuit (USL v. BSDi) in the early 1990s against the University of California.
Later, Sun Microsystems, founded as a spin-off of a student project at Stanford University, also began selling Unix-based desktop workstations in 1982.
While Sun workstations did not utilize commodity PC hardware like Linux was later developed for, it represented the first successful commercial attempt at distributing a primarily single-user microcomputer that ran a Unix operating system.
In addition, MINIX's 16-bit design was not well adapted to the 32-bit features of the increasingly cheap and popular Intel 386 architecture for personal computers.
On 3 July 1991, in an effort to implement Unix system calls in his project, Linus Torvalds attempted to obtain a digital copy of the POSIX standards documentation with a request to the comp.os.minix newsgroup.
Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name.
To demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced ([ˈliːnɵks]), Torvalds included an audio guide (listenⓘ) with the kernel source code.
This was because when they were about to select the mascot, Torvalds mentioned he was bitten by a little penguin (Eudyptula minor) on a visit to the National Zoo & Aquarium in Canberra, Australia.
The name Tux was suggested by James Hughes as derivative of Torvalds' UniX, along with being short for tuxedo, a type of suit with color similar to that of a penguin.
[citation needed] The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) was created in the year 2000, and is an independent nonprofit organization which pursues the goal of optimizing Linux for employment in data centers and in the carrier range.
KDE was the first advanced desktop environment (version 1.0 released in July 1998), but it was controversial due to the then-proprietary Qt toolkit used.
[35] GNOME 3, released in April 2011, was called an "unholy mess" by Linus Torvalds due to its controversial design changes.
The relatively well-funded distribution, Ubuntu, designed (and released in June 2011) another user interface called Unity which is radically different from the conventional desktop environment and has been criticized as having various flaws[37] and lacking configurability.
Among the most significant criticisms were that: Tanenbaum's prediction that Linux would become outdated within a few years and replaced by GNU Hurd (which he considered to be more modern) proved incorrect.
I told him that MINIX had clearly had a huge influence on Linux in many ways, from the layout of the file system to the names in the source tree, but I didn't think Linus had used any of my code.The book's claims, methodology and references were seriously questioned and in the end it was never released and was delisted from the distributor's site.
[48] Competition entered a new phase in the beginning of 2004, when Microsoft published results from customer case studies evaluating the use of Windows vs. Linux under the name "Get the Facts" on its own web page.
Based on inquiries, research analysts, and some Microsoft sponsored investigations, the case studies claimed that enterprise use of Linux on servers compared unfavorably to the use of Windows in terms of reliability, security, and total cost of ownership.
[49] In response, commercial Linux distributors produced their own studies, surveys and testimonials to counter Microsoft's campaign.
Novell's web-based campaign at the end of 2004 was entitled "Unbending the truth" and sought to outline the advantages as well as dispelling the widely publicized legal liabilities of Linux deployment (particularly in light of the SCO v IBM case).
In July 2009, Microsoft submitted 22,000 lines of source code to the Linux kernel under the GPLV2 license in order to better support being a guest for Windows Virtual PC/Hyper-V, which were subsequently accepted.
Microsoft contributed the drivers to rectify the licence violation, although the company attempted to portray it as a charitable act, rather than one to avoid legal action against it.
In August 2018, SUSE created a Linux kernel specifically tailored to the cloud computing applications under the Microsoft Azure project umbrella.
"[57] In recent years, Torvalds has expressed a neutral to friendly attitude towards Microsoft following the company's new embrace of open source software and collaboration with the Linux community.
The Linux Mark Institute, which represents Linus Torvalds' rights, announced a price increase from 500 to 5,000 dollars for the use of the name.
In response to this increase, the community became displeased, which is why Linus Torvalds made an announcement on 21 August 2005, in order to dissolve the misunderstandings.
In an e-mail he described the current situation as well as the background in detail and also dealt with the question of who had to pay license costs: [...] And let's repeat: somebody who doesn't want to protect that name would never do this.
Even pro bono lawyers charge for the time of their costs and paralegals etc.The Linux Mark Institute has since begun to offer a free, perpetual worldwide sublicense.
