What Is Linux?

Linux is a free operating system that was created by Linus Torvalds when he was a student at the University of Helsinki in 1991. Torvalds started Linux by writing a kernel — the heart of the operating system — partly from scratch and partly by using publicly available software. (For the definition of an operating system and a kernel, see the sidebar "What Is an Operating System?" later in this chapter.) Torvalds then released the system to his friends and to a community of "hackers" on the Internet and asked them to work with it, fix it, and enhance it. It took off.

Cross-Reference?

See Chapter 14 for a discussion about the difference between hackers (who just like to play with computers) and crackers (who break into computer systems and cause damage).

Today, there are hundreds of software developers around the world contributing software to the Linux effort. Because the source code for the software is freely available, anyone can work on it, change it, or enhance it. Developers are encouraged to feed their fixes and improvements back into the community so that Linux can continue to grow and improve.

On top of the Linux kernel effort, the creators of Linux also drew on a great deal of system software and applications that are now bundled with Linux from the GNU software effort (GNU stands for "GNU is Not UNIX"), which is directed by the Free Software Foundation (www.gnu.org). There is a vast amount of software that can be used with Linux, all of which includes features that can compete with or surpass those of any other operating system in the world.

If you have heard Linux described as a free version of UNIX, there is good reason for it. Although much of the code for Linux started from scratch, the blueprint for what the code would do was created to follow POSIX standards. POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX) is a computer industry operating system standard that every major version of UNIX complied with. In other words, if your operating system was POSIX-compliant, it was UNIX. See the next section describing Linux's roots in the UNIX operating system.