A Small History Of Linux

The GNU Project, with the goal of creating a UNIX-like operating system composed entirely of free software, had begun development in 1984, and a year later Richard Stallman had created the Free Software Foundation and wrote the first draft of the GNU General Public License (GPLv1). By the early 1990s, the project had produced or collected many necessary operating system components, including libraries, compilers, text editors, and a Unix shell, and the upper level could be supplied by the X Window System, but development of the lower level, which consisted of a kernel, device drivers and daemons had stalled and was incomplete.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds began to work on the Linux kernel while he was attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally intended Linux to be a non-commercial replacement for Minix, an educational operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

Code licensed under the GNU GPL can be used in other projects, so long as they too are released under the GPL. In order to make the Linux kernel compatible with the components from the GNU project, Torvalds changed his original license to the GPLv2. Linux and GNU developers worked to integrate GNU components

with Linux. Thus Linux became a complete, fully functional free operating system.

A Small History Of Linux