The history of GNU/Linux
Tags: linux, webdev, beginners, programming
Published: 2022-08-30 15:54:13

> Recipes are like computer programs. There are rules, steps to follow and also guidelines that tell us when the recipe starts and when it ends to obtain a final result. So, if you like to cook, you share your recipes with friends so that they can try them and they can even modify them to their liking, now imagine a world where someone has dictated that you cannot modify the recipes and if you do, you are a criminal who would have to be in jail.

[Richard Stallman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman)

What is [Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux)? Why is it sometimes called GNU/Linux, or sometimes just Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora? Why Linux? One asks these kinds of questions every time the [penguin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_(mascot)) operating system is mentioned, but don’t worry, today I’m going to clarify the panorama so that the next time someone mentions something related to this operating system, you can give them a little lecture about.

## 1969 the year that changed history
The beginning of the Internet [ARPANET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#:~:text=ARPANET%20fue%20una%20red%20de,diferentes%20instituciones%20acad%C3%A9micas%20y%20estatales.), the first steps of man on the moon, the [Woodstock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock) festival, the birth of [Linus Torvalds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds) and of course, the launch of [Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix) the Father of operating systems, all of this amazingly happened in the same year.

[Dennis Ritchie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie) and [Ken Thompson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson) workers at Bell Laboratories, developed an OS or Operating System, which was based on [Multics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics), which could maintain information with different levels of confidentiality on a single machine using permissions, also brought some more curiosities that remain In modern OS, they added a [file system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system) and many mini-programs with very specific functions that could be combined to create other more complex functions, all of which strongly attracted the attention of hundreds of [Hackers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker).

It soon became the preferred OS of universities and large companies, it also had a license for personal computers, the problem here is that **the license was excessively expensive** and students could not afford something like that.

## Richard Stallman, who started the revolution
This and some events in Richard Stallman’s student life led him to create **the greatest software revolution of all time**, So in 1983 after leaving university he released [GNU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU), a recursive acronym for GNU is Not Unix, a cry that It went against the definite rule back then.

For their part, [Microsoft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) and [Apple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.) sold [proprietary Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software) and stylized but expensive and totally sealed Hardware, respectively.

Stallman’s move soon brought together hundreds of passionate developers from around the world, creating small tools and features to incorporate into an almost impossible project, building a complete OS from scratch, which was free to both modify and share with anyone who liked it. Like all the tools they had already developed, these developers, hackers and engineers from all over the world were joined by a certain Linus Torvalds who didn’t do much, just create the most important component of all, the [Kernel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(operating_system)), the which along with his friend Ari Lemmke named Linux.

## The Union
Thanks to the union of the GNU project and the Linux kernel, GNU/Linux as well as **the efforts of a free and tightly-knit community** of developers connected only by their computers and thanks to email, it was possible to create what is now **the most important OS of all**, and I do not say this lightly because we have it everywhere, from distributions like [Debian](https://www.debian.org/index.html), [Red Hat](https://www.redhat.com/en), [Ubuntu](https://ubuntu.com/), [Arch](https://archlinux.org/), and a long etc. even on most servers on the internet and even on millions of cell phones around the world thanks to Google and its [Android](https://www.android.com/).

## Disclaimer
This has been a small summary of years and years of history, for which I did not include many important names, events, and various other things, if you wish you can consult various sources on the internet and books that talk a lot about it.

For now, I leave you a great [documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c) on YouTube talking about the subject with a lot of information that can help you, of course if you have 1 hour and 25 minutes free.

Feel free to write in the comments, if you already knew something about this history of Linux, I would also like you to contribute some additional information so that I can learn more about this exciting topic.

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You can visit my website [https://ricardoveronica.github.io](https://ricardoveronica.github.io/)

You can read this article in Spanish [La historia de GNU/Linux](https://dev.to/ricardoveronica/la-historia-de-gnulinux-349l)