GNU/Linux (The Operating System Of The Future)

The History Of GNU/Linux

The development of the GNU operating system was started by Richard Stallman during the time that he worked at MIT. It was called the GNU Project, and it was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups. In 1984 Stallman quit his job at MIT so they couldn't claim ownership or interfere with distributing GNU components as free software. Richard Stallman chose the name of the GNU Project by using various plays on words, including the song The Gnu. The goal of the GNU Project was to bring a completely free software operating system into existence. Stallman wanted computer users to have the freedom to study the source code of the software they used, share the software with other people, modify the behavior of the software, and publish modified versions of the software. This philosophy was later published as the GNU Manifesto in March 1985. Richard Stallman's experience with the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), which was an early operating system written in assembly language that became obsolete due to discontinuation of PDP-10 which was the computer architecture that ITS was written for, led to the decision by Stallman that a more adaptable system was necessary. It was then decided that the development of GNU would be started using C and Lisp as system programming languages, and that GNU would be compatible with Unix. Which at the time, was already a popular proprietary operating system. Since the design of Unix was modular, it could be reimplemented piece by piece. Much of the needed software had to be written from scratch, but existing compatible third-party free software components were also used such as the TeX typesetting system, the X Window System, and the Mach microkernel that forms the basis of the GNU Mach core of GNU Hurd which is the official kernel of the GNU operating system. With the exception of the aforementioned third-party components, most of GNU has been written by volunteers; some were doing it in their spare time, some were paid by companies, educational institutions, and other non-profit organizations. In October 1985, Richard Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation also known as the FSF. In the late 1980s, the FSF started hiring software developers to write the software needed for the GNU operating system. As GNU gained prominence, interested businesses began contributing to the development or selling of GNU software and technical support. The most prominent and successful of these was Cygnus Solutions, now part of Red Hat.

In 1991, while attending the University of Helsinki Linus Torvalds became curious about operating systems. Frustrated by the licensing of MINIX, which at the time-limited it to educational use only, he began to work on his own operating system kernel, which eventually became the Linux kernel. Torvalds began the development of the Linux kernel on MINIX and many applications written for MINIX were also used on Linux. Later, Linux matured and further Linux kernel development took place on Linux systems. GNU applications later replaced all MINIX components, because it was advantageous to use the freely available code from the GNU Project with the fledgling operating system; code licensed under the GNU GPL can be reused in other computer programs as long as they also are released under the same or a compatible license. Torvalds soon started to switch from his original license, which prohibited commercial redistribution, to the GNU GPL. Developers worked to integrate GNU components with the Linux kernel, making a fully functional and free operating system. The GNU Project started to officially support the Linux kernel in 2012 which was when GNU/Linux started to become more well known. Since 2012 GNU Linux has made huge strides in its hardware compatibility and supports devices from the High-end to Low-end computers as old as 2005 in some cases, which is pretty crazy for a modern operating system.