this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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That kind of depends on how you define FOSS. The way we think of that today was in very early stages back in the 1991 and the orignal source was distributed as free, both as in speech and as in beer, but commercial use was prohibited, so it doesn't strictly speaking qualify as FOSS (like we understand it today). About a year later Linux was released under GPL and the rest is history.
Public domain code, academic world with any source code and things like that predate both Linux and GNU by a few decades and even the Free Software Foundation came 5-6 years before Linux, but the Linux itself has been pretty much as free as it is today from the start. GPL, GNU, FSF and all the things Stallman created or was a part of (regardless of his conflicting personality) just created a set of rules on how to play this game, pretty much before any game or rules for it existed.
Minix was a commercial thing from the start, Linux wasn't, and things just refined on the way. You are of course correct that the first release of Linux wasn't strictly speaking FOSS, but the whole 'FOSS' mentality and rules for it wasn't really a thing either back then.
There's of course adacemic debate to have for days on which came first and what rules whoever did obey and what release counts as FOSS or not, but for all intents and purposes, Linux was free software from the start and the competition was not.
I read a biography of Stallman several years ago. The whole free software movement was an attempt to preserve the early hacker culture where everybody freely swapped code. So, Stallman didn't really "invent" FOSS; he just codified that early hacker ethos.
Agree with you up until “the competition was not”.
GNU HURD was competition for one thing.
More importantly, so was BSD. BSD predates Linux ( though its distribution specifically as FreeBSD does not ).
I've read Linus's book several years ago, and based on that flimsy knowledge on back of my head, I don't think Linus was really competing with anyone at the time. Hurd was around, but it's still coming soon(tm) to widespread use and things with AT&T and BSD were "a bit" complex at the time.
BSD obviously has brought a ton of stuff on the table which Linux greatly benefited from and their stance on FOSS shouldn't go without appreciation, but assuming my history knowledge isn't too badly flawed, BSD and Linux weren't straight competitors, but they started to gain traction (regardless of a lot longer history with BSD) around the same time and they grew stronger together instead of competing with eachother.
A ton of us owes our current corporate lifes to the people who built the stepping stones before us, and Linus is no different. Obviously I personally owe Linus a ton for enabling my current status at the office, but the whole thing wouldn't been possible without people coming before him. RMS and GNU movement plays a big part of that, but equally big part is played by a ton of other people.
I'm not an expert by any stretch on history of Linux/Unix, but I'm glad that the people preceding my career did what they did. Covering all the bases on the topic would require a ton more than I can spit out on a platform like this, I'm just happy that we have the FOSS movement at all instead of everything being a walled garden today.
386BSD was not available until some months after Linux was released, so you had GNU with no working kernel and BSD not yet available on the hardware he had, hardware a lot of normal people had. I think the GPL also felt more philosophically right to many of them, and it limited how much they needed to re-do work that someone else had already done but kept secret.
The AT&T lawsuit definitely hampered BSD growth just as it was ported to the 386, but it was filed after Linux was already a thing.