af_bella

"The Linux kernel was designed by Linus Torvalds, following the lack of a working kernel for GNU, a Unix-compatible operating system made entirely of free software that had been undergoing development since 1983 by Richard Stallman. A working Unix system called Minix was later released but its license was not entirely free at the time and it was made for an educative purpose. The first entirely free Unix for personal computers, 386BSD, did not appear until 1992, by which time Torvalds had already built and publicly released the first version of the Linux kernel on the Internet. Like GNU and 386BSD, Linux did not have any Unix code, being a fresh reimplementation, and therefore avoided the then legal issues. Linux distributions became popular in the 1990s and effectively made Unix technologies accessible to home users on personal computers whereas previously it had been confined to sophisticated workstations. Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland and a desktop environment such as GNOME, KDE Plasma or Xfce. Distributions intended for servers may not have a graphical user interface at all or include a solution stack such as LAMP. The source code of Linux may be used, modified, and distributed commercially or non-commercially by anyone under the terms of its respective licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL). The license means creating novel distributions is permitted by anyone and is easier than it would be for an operating system such as MacOS or Microsoft Windows. The Linux kernel, for example, is licensed under the GPLv2, with an exception for system calls that allows code that calls the kernel via system calls not to be licensed under the GPL."