Brief History of Linux and How Its Philosophy Brought about Open Source Contribution.

Linux is one of the most popular and used OS in the world. Let’s understand how Linux developed from a college student’s project in Finland to a gigantic undertaking with a massive impact on today’s world.

History

Linux is an open-source computer operating system that was originally developed for Intel x86-based personal computers. It has since been ported to an impressive number of other hardware platforms, ranging from tiny embedded appliances to the world’s largest supercomputers.

Linus Torvalds was a student in Helsinki, Finland, in 1991, when he began work on his own operating system kernel. He also gathered and/or created the additional components needed to build a comprehensive operating system with his kernel at its core. It wasn’t long before this became known as the Linux kernel.

In 1992, Linux was re-licensed using the General Public License (GPL) by GNU (a project of the Free Software Foundation or FSF, which promotes freely available software), allowing it to grow a worldwide community of developers. Many other developers produced entire systems known as Linux Distributions in the mid-1990s by merging the kernel with other system components from the GNU project. The mid-90s Linux distributions established the foundation for totally free (in the sense of freedom, not zero cost) computing and became a driving force in the open-source software movement. In 1998, big companies…