PETRA : You may have already heard of the Linux operating system.
Let's look at its history.
REMI : By the early 1980s, the Unix operating system
had been largely adopted by universities and research
centers which led to further adoption by many startups and companies.
PETRA : In 1983, Unix inventors Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
received the Turing Award for their invention.
And that same year, Richard Stallman of MIT launched the GNU Project.
REMI : GNU is a recursive acronym, referring to itself,
that stands for GNU is Not Unix.
The GNU Project is an open and free, collaborative project
to develop and provide software compatible with Unix.
The big difference between the GNU Project and Unix
is that Unix is owned by Bell Labs, which
sells licenses for use or modification, while the GNU Project is free,
and anyone can use or modify the entire project.
PETRA : Richard Stallman is a strong advocate for free and open source
software.
In 1989, he conceived of the GNU General Public
License, which aims to preserve the freedom
to use, study, modify, and distribute software and its derivative versions.
REMI : By 1990, the GNU Project included a lot of software already,
text editors, a graphical user interface similar to Windows,
libraries, the GNU C Compiler--
GCC-- a C language compiler, et cetera.
PETRA : The problem was that one had to use this free software on the Unix
operating system that itself is proprietary and not open or free.
This is where Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science
student at the University of Helsinki, intervened.
He was frustrated by these proprietary licenses that limited
the use of the operating system.
REMI : On August 25, 1991, he sent a message
to the community that started like this, "Hi, everyone.
I am doing a free operating system.
It's just a hobby.
It will not be as big and as professional as the GNU Project."
PETRA : This project, which later became the Linux kernel,
was written specifically to be independent of an operating system,
and was meant to run on Linus Torvalds' PC, with an 83.86 processor.
Development was done using the GNU C Compiler, which to this day
is still the main choice for compiling Linux.
REMI : Just as in the case of the GNU Project, the community formed.
And developers of the GNU Project quickly integrated
free software to run on the Linux kernel, which itself is also free.
PETRA : In 1992, the first Linux distributions
were released and consisted of the free Linux operating
system and a collection of free GNU Project software
tools, such as editors, libraries, compilers, et cetera.
REMI : By 1993, there were already more than 100 developers
from around the world who worked on modifying and improving Linux.
1993 was also the year of some very popular Linux distributions,
for example Debian.
PETRA : By the end of the '90s, the major computer manufacturers
Dell, IBM, and HP announced compatibility of their hardware
with Linux.
During the 2000s, Linux was deployed more and more
as the operating system that runs web servers.
REMI : In the 2010s, Linux and Unix-based operating systems
became the most widely used systems on internet servers, taking about 70%
of the market share, and smartphones, around 90%, since the Android operating
system is based on Linux and iOS is based on Unix.
PETRA : These operating systems also started dominating supercomputers,
for example for scientific calculations or for the film and special effects
industry, around 99% of the market share.
Linux and Unix-based operating systems can further be found in game consoles,
for example Playstation, internet boxes, Wi-Fi routers, and connected objects
such as internet-connected watches.
REMI : The Linux operating system or other Unix derivatives
have become a part of many aspects of our everyday life.