Skip to main content

Linux History and GNU

Linus Torvalds,a student at the University of Helsinki started developing Linux to create a system similar to MINIX, a UNIX operating system. In 1991 he released version 0.02; Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel, the core of the operating system, was released in 1994. About the same time, American software developer Richard Stallman and the FSF made efforts to create an open-source UNIX-like operating system called GNU. In contrast to Torvalds, Stallman and the FSF started by creating utilities for the operating system first. These utilities were then added to the Linux kernel to create a complete system called GNU/Linux, or, less precisely, just Linux.

Linus Torvalds

Richard Stallman


Linux grew throughout the 1990s because of the efforts of hobbyist developers. Although Linux is not as user-friendly as the popular Microsoft Windows and Mac OS operating systems, it is an efficient and reliable system that rarely crashes. Combined with Apache, an open-source Web server, Linux accounts for more than a third of all servers used on the Internet. Because it is open source, and thus modifiable for different uses, Linux is popular for systems as diverse as cellular telephones and supercomputers. The addition of user-friendly desktop environments, office suites, Web browsers, and even games helped to increase Linux’s popularity and make it more suitable for home and office desktops. New distributions (packages of Linux software) were created throughout the 1990s. Some of the more well-known distributions include Ubuntu,Red Hat, Debian, Mint etc.Linux adoption grew among businesses and governments in the 1990s and 2000s. In the English-speaking world at least, Ubuntu and its derivatives became a relatively popular group of Linux distributions.

The name “GNU” is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix!”;

GNU was launched by Richard Stallman in 1983, as an operating system which would be put together by people working together for the freedom of all software users to control their computing. The primary and continuing goal of GNU is to offer a Unix-compatible system that would be 100% free software. Not 95% free, not 99.5%, but 100%. Technically, GNU is like Unix. But unlike Unix, GNU gives its users freedom.
Completely free system distributions (“distros”) meeting this goal are available today.Thousands of people have joined in to make GNU the success it is today, and there are many ways to contribute, both technical and non-technical.


GNU has been supported in several ways by the Free Software Foundation, the nonprofit organization also founded by Richard Stallman to advocate free software ideals. Among other things, the FSF accepts copyright assignments and disclaimers, so it can act in court on behalf of GNU programs. (To be clear, contributing a program to GNU does not require transferring copyright to the FSF. If you do assign copyright, the FSF will enforce the GPL for the program if someone violates it; if you keep the copyright, enforcement will be up to you.)
The ultimate goal is to provide free software to do all of the jobs computer users want to do—and thus make proprietary software a thing of the past.
“The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit organization with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and defend the rights of all software users.”

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Bash Shell Script

What Are Shell Scripts? In the simplest terms, a shell script is a file containing a series of commands. The shell reads this file and carries out the commands as though they have been entered directly on the command line. The shell is somewhat unique, in that it is both a powerful command line interface to the system and a scripting language interpreter. As we will see, most of the things that can be done on the command line can be done in scripts, and most of the things that can be done in scripts can be done on the command line. Writing Your First Script And Getting It To Work To successfully write a shell script, you have to do three things: Write a script Give the shell permission to execute it Put it somewhere the shell can find it Writing A Script A shell script is a file that contains ASCII text. To create a shell script, you use a text editor . A text editor is a program, like a word processor, that reads and writes ASCII text files. There are...
Post a Comment
Read more

Basic Linux Commands For Beginner's

Basic Linux Commands for Beginners Linux is an Operating System’s Kernel. You might have heard of UNIX. Well, Linux is a UNIX clone. But it was actually created by Linus Torvalds from Scratch. Linux is free and open-source, that means that you can simply change anything in Linux and redistribute it in your own name! There are several Linux Distributions, commonly called “distros”. A few of them are: Mint Ubuntu Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux Debian Fedora Kali Linux is Mainly used in Servers. About 90% of the Internet is powered by Linux Servers. This is because Linux is fast, secure, and free! The main problem of using Windows Servers are their cost. This is solved by using Linux Servers. Forgot to mention, the OS that runs in about 80% of the Smartphones in the World, Android, is also made from the Linux Kernel. Yes, Linux is amazing! A simple example of its security is that most of the viruses in the world run on Windows, but not on Linux...
4 comments
Read more

Shell

Definition of the Shell Shell is an interactive environment which provides an interface to an Operating System. It gathers input from user and execute the commands. Bourne shell(sh)- 1977 The Bourne shell was introduced. The Bourne shell(sh), by Stephen Bourne at AT&T Bell Labs for V7 UNIX, remains a useful shell today (in some cases, as the default root shell). The Bourne shell was developed after working on an ALGOL68 compiler, so its grammar is more along the lines of Algorithmic Language (ALGOL) than other shells. The source code was developed in C. The Bourne shell served two primary goals: Executing UNIX/Linux commands for the operating system,i.e, command line interpreter Writing reusable scripts that could be invoked through the shell,i.e, scripting In addition to replacing the Thompson shell, the Bourne shell offered many other advantages over its predecessors such as control flows, loops, and variables into scripts, providing a more functional language to...
Post a Comment
Read more