The Linux Operating System

In 1991, while a computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds began a project as a hobby, not related to his coursework. In the project, he wrote programs in C to interact directly with the 80386 CPU of his personal computer while bypassing the operating system of the computer. These programs would go on to become the kernel of the Linux operating system, which is an alternative to Windows operating system.

Linus Torvalds wanted to call his software Freax, a combination of "free" and "x" to mean a flavor of Unix. But, when he uploaded the files of his program to a server for others to download, one of the volunteer administrators of the server named the project "Linux", and the name stuck. Apart from the kernel, the Linux operating system also contains a shell that allows the user to issue commands to the kernel and utilities such as compilers. The utilities and compilers are those produced by the GNU (Gnu is not Unix) project, a popular developer of open-source utilities.

At first, Linus made the Linux operating system kernel available for free personal but not commercial use. Later on, he released it under GNU General Public License (GPL) which allows four freedoms: the freedom to run, copy, study/improve and distribute the work. The use of GPL is cited as one of the reasons why Linux became one of the most popular operating systems of all time. Other reasons included that it was free and ran on affordable personal computers.

The Linux kernel is now ubiquitous. It is in Android phones, and it runs many of the servers used to place calls, send texts, stream music, watch videos, play games, etc. It runs TOP500 Supercomputers and powers public clouds. It runs rendering farms for movie studios and powers Chromebooks for kids doing virtual learning. It powers Raspberry Pi single board computers for hobbyists and powers everything from the Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for streaming services to set top boxes and smart TVs.

Linux is now an enormous open source project that is being maintained and extended by over 600,000 programmers from around the world. Programmers submit programs or patches. Subsystem maintainers review the programs, sign off on patches and accept the code for inclusion. The entire effort is coordinated by Linux Foundation, a non-profit open source software foundation. While initially, most of the contributors were passionate volunteers, these days, most of them are paid by their employers such as Intel, Google, Facebook, Samsung, Oracle, Red Hat, SuSE and IBM to contribute.