The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and friends
starting about 1991. The pronunciation /liŽnuhks/ is preferred because the
name ‘Linus’ has an /ee/ sound in Swedish (Linus's family is
part of Finland's 6% ethnic-Swedish minority) and Linus considers English
short /i/ to be closer to
/ee/ than English long /i:/. This may be the most remarkable
hacker project in history — an entire clone of Unix for 386, 486 and
Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the net (ports to
Alpha and Sparc and many other machines are also in use).
Linux is what GNU aimed to be, and it relies
on the GNU toolset. But the Free Software Foundation didn't produce the
kernel to go with that toolset until 1999, which was too late. Other,
similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been technically successful
but never caught fire the way Linux has; as this is written in 2003, Linux
has effectively swallowed all proprietary Unixes except Solaris and is
seriously challenging Microsoft. It has already captured 41% of the
Internet-server market and over 25% of general business servers.
An earlier version of this entry opined “The secret of Linux's
success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to keep the
development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball
effect.” Truer than we knew. See
bazaar.
(Some people object that the name ‘Linux’ should be used
to refer only to the kernel, not the entire operating system. This claim
is a proxy for an underlying territorial dispute; people who insist on the
term GNU/Linux want the
FSF to get most of the credit for Linux because RMS
and friends wrote many of its user-level tools. Neither this theory nor
the term GNU/Linux has gained more
than minority acceptance).
