The goal is to build a complete free operating system. Cygnus, the first commercial company devoted to provide commercial support for GNU software and open source software in general, is funded. Their goal is to fill in the last major hole in the GNU suite of software for creating a fully open source development system. William and Lynne Jolitz write a series in Dr. Dobbs Journal on how to port BSD Unix to i386-based PCs. Linus Torvalds publicly releases the source code for his Unix-like kernel, which is named Linux.
Developers can now work on Linux without using any proprietary tools or operating systems.
ACT decides to make money by evolving GNAT and selling support services, rather than by selling GNAT itself. Over time and with the help of ACT, GNAT becomes the dominant Ada 95 compiler. Like the Debian distribution, it is intended to improve on the then-dominant Slackware distribution. First issue of the Linux Journal is published. FreeBSD 2.0 is released.