GNU/Linux History

Michał ‘mina86’ Nazarewicz | 12 lutego 2008

This article was prepared as presentation for my English class and since I made it I thought to put it on my homepage. As presentation it was not designed to read so please excuse me for lousy language. Moreover, I don't claim that it presents the whole history nor that it is the best source of information, however someone may find it useful.

The printer

Once upon a time Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) got a prototype of a new Xerox 9700 laser printer, which printed pages faster and in higher quality then the old printer used at the lab. Unfortunately, it turned out that it tended to get jammed.

Engineers at the lab quickly realised that, because it was a modified version of a xerox machine, it was designed to work with a supervisor how could quickly solve any problems, however, after modification it worked as a network machine so noöne stood next to it to make sure everything went fine.

The previous printer that had been used at the lab (the XGP, Xerographic Printer) had similar bug and a simple hack had been applied to its software to solve it — when the printer got jammed it noticed everyone who had jobs on the queue so eventually someone would come and examine the problem. This solution did the job, so Richard M. Stallman decided to do the same thing with the new printer.

He started looking for the source code of printer’s software, however, it turned out that there was no human-readable version available. Stallman had never encountered situation when source code of an application is unavailable before, nevertheless he hoped that someone who used the same printer had decoded the software’s binaries and made it available.

He remembered that when AI Lab needed a new network controlling software instead of writing everything from stretch they took a copy of tools written at Harvard university, modified it a bit and with small effort made it work in their laboratory. They also fixed some bugs so Harvard could benefit from this as well.

Stallman soon realised that it won’t be easy to get to printer’s software’s source code (he even met a programmer who worked on printer’s software at Xerox but could not give him the code) because of a new kind of contract called non disclosure agreement (or NDA for short) which prevented programmers from revealing information about software they develop.

Now, think of a software as a recipe. They are very similar since recipe gives steps you have to follow to get some kind of result. Software is the same — it takes some steps to accomplish a task. In real life you use recipe, share them with your friends who can then change it so that they like the meal better. Now, imagine a world where you cannot share your recipe. Where you cannot even modify it, so there is some kind of dictator who decide how given meal tastes and you cannot do anything about it even if you think the meal would be better with a little more garlic. That’s what software licenses made to software — you cannot modify proprietary software to fit your needs and you cannot even share it with your friends.

If you really want to you can blame Bill Gates for that because he was on of the pioneers of proprietary software model. On February 3, 1976, he wrote an open letter in a Homebrew Computer Club (formed by a group of hackers and computer hobbyists) Newsletter. The main point of the letter was that noöne will work for free to produce a good quality software. Example he pointed was his own BASIC application used by many people who did not pay for it which made time spent on developing Altair BASIC worth less than two dollars per hour.

The GNU project

On September 27, 1983 Richard Stallman announced on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups that he’s going to write a free operating system which will be compatible with Unix OSes. Later on, on January 5, 1984, he quits his job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology so that they could not claim ownership or interfere with distributing GNU as free software.

The goal was to bring a wholly free software operating system into existence. Stallman wanted computer users to be free, as most were in the 1960s and 1970s: free to study the source code of the software they use, free to share the software with other people, free to modify the behaviour of the software, and free to publish their modified versions of the software. This philosophy was published in March 1985 as the GNU Manifesto.


As there wasn’t many free software in 1980s, much of the needed tools had to be written from scratch, but existing compatible free software components were used. Two examples were the TeX typesetting system, and the X Window System. Most of GNU has been written by volunteers; some in their spare time, some paid by companies, educational institutions, and other non-profit organisations. In October 1985, Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In the late 1980s and 1990s, the FSF hired software developers to write the software needed for GNU.

As GNU gained prominence, interested businesses began contributing to development or selling GNU software and technical support. The most prominent and successful of these was Cygnus Solutions funded in 1989, now part of Red Hat.

Missing kernel

By 1990, the GNU system had an extensible text editor (Emacs), a very successful optimising compiler (GCC), and most of the core libraries and utilities of a standard Unix distribution.

The main component still missing was the kernel. In the GNU Manifesto, Stallman had mentioned that “an initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix.” He was referring to TRIX, a remote procedure call kernel developed at MIT, whose authors had decided to distribute it as free software, and was compatible with Version 7 Unix. In December 1986, work had started on modifying this kernel. However, the developers eventually decided it was unusable as a starting point, primarily because it only ran on “an obscure, expensive 68000 box” and would therefore have to be ported to other architectures before it could be used.

The GNU Project’s early plan was to adapt the BSD 4. 4-Lite kernel for GNU. Thomas Bushnell, the initial Hurd architect said in hindsight that “It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today”. However, due to a lack of coöperation from the Berkeley programmers, the Mach message-passing kernel being developed at Carnegie Mellon University was being considered instead, although its release as free software was delayed until 1990 while its developers worked to remove code copyrighted to AT&T.

The Linux kernel

At the same time, Linus Torvalds at University of Helsinki started creating an operating systems for Intel architecture. He announced that in September 1991 in a notice posted to comp.os.minix newsgroup. Soon the first 0.01 version of Linux was released.

Torvaldds himself have chosen the name Freax which combines free, freak and the obligatory x since it was a Unix-like system. However, the person who put source codes on the FTP site didn’t like the name and put them in directory called Linux and so the name stayed.

At the beginning Linux was developed under stricter conditions then those imposed by GNU General Public License. In particular it could not be used sold. Quickly, however, the license was changed to the GNU GPL.

Because more and more people played with the Linux kernel (Linus Torvalds describes that in 1992 it was no longer he and a couple of friends but he and hundred people who he didn’t know where they live or who they are) some tried to find a software that would run on it. They soon found the GNU system which perfectly matched the kernel forming the complete operating system, unfortunately they didn’t realise that it was a GNU system and in turn started calling the whole thing Linux which made it more difficult to get people attention to the GNU project and the idea behind it.

Because of that Richard Stallman advocates use of a term GNU/Linux which points out that it’s not just Linux but it also contains the GNU software. He also advocates to read it with GNU slash Linux since GNU Linux could give an impression that Linux is a GNU software package.

Killer app

To become popular GNU/Linux needed a killer app which will brought the new operating system to light and make it available for business.

In 1994 development of National Center for Supercomputing Applications web server, known simply as NCSA HTTPd, stalled leaving a variety of patches for improvements circulating through e-mails. Rob McCool and several other developers decided to take all available patches and continue development. They chose Apache as a name because it started as a set of patches, that is it is a patchy web server.

At the same time, Internet becomes more and more popular. All new ISP companies a web server and it turned out that GNU/Linux with Apache installed was a stable and cost effective alternative to Windows NT with IIS or Netscape Communications Corporation web server. For instance, ISP could host many web pages on a single machine which wasn’t possible with commercial solutions.

Big companies

Later on, in late 1990s a browser war begun. Netscape Communication Corporation with their Netscape Navigator thought against Microsoft with their Internet Explorer to gain dominance in web browser market. It was really important for Netscape not to lose this war because otherwise Microsoft with monopoly could modify HTTP and HTML witch would make Netscape’s web server incompatible with the mostly used web browser and web server was where Netscape really earned money.

At the time Netscape Navigator was a closed source application even though it was available free of charge. The idea of releasing the source code, however, was present in the company.

Finally, on January 22, 1995 Netscape Communication released its browser source code giving the new browser the name Mozilla web browser. It was another important step in GNU/Linux history since Netscape was the first big company which invested in the idea of free software. It gave GNU/Linux visibility and credibility with investors.

Open Source

Some of the developers felt that the term Free Software is not good for business. It didn’t help GNU/Linux to spread. The term was either connected with a free as in beer and therefore probably worthless software or with Richard Stallman who had criticised copyright and intellectual property and (even though he was never against business) wasn’t really liked with businessmen.

In the early 1995, in the VA Linux office in Mountain View a new term was introduced — Open Source software. Its focus was in practical advantages of open source, that is the cost effectiveness, instant peer review and possibility to modify application in such a way that it fits your needs best. Soon an Open Source Definition (based on The Debian Free Software Guidelines) was created witch pointed rules which software have to meet to be called an Open Source software and an Open Source Initiative (or OSI for short) was funded to spread the idea of Open Source Software.

The community

Richard Stallman criticises the new term and the new Open Source movement. He does agree with arguments stated but he believes that there is something more important in Free Software than creating high quality tools. He believes that the freedom to share and modify, that the advantages for the community are more important than the practical benefits.

It’s a bit sad that the man who started everything doesn’t really have attention he deserves. Even more so since ideas he believes in are really noble and he cares about community more than other Open Source developers.


When we were in elementary school, teachers touched us to share — if you bring a candy share it with others. Now however, we are told that sharing is bad — if you bring a piece of software do not share it because it’s stealing. World will be a much worse place if we stop sharing candies or lending sugar to your neighbour…