I would like to present you with a timeline of events that happened in the early 1980s and 1990s.
For Richard Stallman, things started to look bad with the collapse of the free community at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 1980s, with modern-era operating systems, none of them free software, coming with a deal. of confidentiality it said, you are not allowed to share or change the software and if you want to change something, ask us to do it for you.
This sounded antisocial to the software-sharing community that had existed for many years at MIT, which enjoyed and agreed to share its programs with universities and companies. And seeing or changing the source code of an unknown program to create a new one was quite common.
After losing his community, Stallman always had the option of joining the world of proprietary software, writing code under non-disclosure agreements, which he believed divided the software society and a means of not helping a fellow hacker (“Someone who loves to code and enjoys being smart about it”) or quitting the computer field, which was pretty nasty as it would have wasted his skills as an operating system developer. Another way was to rebuild the community by rewriting free programs.
GNU Project
Now the idea was quite clear, the first thing that was needed was an operating system. With a free operating system, a community of cooperative hackers could use a computer without starting to deprive their friend. He chose to make the system UNIX-compatible so that it would be portable and easily changed by UNIX users. The name GNU was chosen for the project in a hacker tradition, as a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”.
The GNU project started with the goal of creating a “free software” society, here the term “free” is often misunderstood and has nothing to do with price. It’s about freedom. Is defined as:
•You are free to run the program, for any purpose.
• You have the freedom to modify the program to adapt it to your needs. (For this freedom to be effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes to a program without having the source code is extremely difficult.)
•You are free to redistribute copies, either free or for a fee.
•You are free to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.
After leaving his job at MIT in 1984, Stallman began writing GNU software. He first started by writing a compiler from scratch, which is now popularly known as GCC, and the GNU Emacs editor for writing and editing his programs.
Free Software Foundation
As Emacs users grew, more people became involved in the GNU project, and this forced Stallman to seek funding. So in 1985 the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was created, a tax-exempt charity for the development of free software. Since then, employees of the Free Software Foundation have written and maintained several GNU software packages, two notable ones being the C library and the shell.
Gradually more and more programs were added to the GNU system and most of them gained popularity as they could run on Unix systems, and users began to extend and port them to the various incompatible versions of Unix and sometimes to other versions as well. systems.
In 1990, the GNU system was almost complete, and an important link was missing, the kernel, which actually does the job of managing system resources. The decision was to implement the kernel as a collection of server processes running on top of Mach, a microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University and later at the University of Utah. This kernel called GNU HURD (or “gnus herd”) could run on top of Mach and do the various jobs of the UNIX kernel.
GNU/Linux system
In 1991, a student from Finland named Linus Torvalds developed a Unix-compatible kernel and called it Linux. And around 1992, the combination of Linux with the GNU system, which was not quite complete, resulted in a completely free operating system, the GNU/Linux system. Thanks to Linux, a version of the GNU system could be run today.
GPL (GNU General Public License)
All software under the GNU project was distributed under the GPL, which says you can copy and distribute exact copies of the program’s source code just as you received it. You may make changes or modify the program and redistribute again under the first-mentioned condition, with clear notices of your changes and the date of that change.
Linux distributions
Many Linux distributions based on the GNU/Linux system are currently available as both free copies and commercial distributions. Most of these distributors add their own features, focusing on specific areas like Enterprise, Desktop, Multimedia, etc., to the existing GNU system, to cater for various sections of users. Some prominent ones are RedHat, Fedora (an open RedHat project), Debian, Novell’s Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Sabayon, PCLinuxOS, SimplyMEPIS, Knoppix, Gentoo, etc. All of these distros aim to target different sets of users. So now you have the options of choosing the distro based on your intended usage such as suse, ubuntu, PCLinuxOS for ease of use, debian, fedora for development, RedHat for enterprise, etc. Less to say that programming would be a delight for all of them.
Where do I get Linux?
Most Linux distributions are freely available for download from the Internet;
Fedora from download.fedora.redhat.com
Suse from novell.com
Debian from debian.org
There are also other links from where you can download these distributions. And if you don’t want to waste time downloading, buy them from people like OSDisc.com, LinuxCD.org, etc., but you’ll surely find one among your peers.
