Freedom OS 03/28/23

Unix was an operating system developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in the 1970s at Bell Labs research center by AT&T. It featured multiple separate programs, working together by passing information from one program to another.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Richard Matthew Stallman and the AI lab at MIT started the FSF movement and the GNU project, which aimed to recreate all the Unix programs and to make them publicly available, hence the acronym: GNU is Not Unix.

It is reasonable to assume that without RMS's efforts to create the GNU project and the FSF movement, the kernel's adoption wouldn't have been this great.

According to Linus, the mission of an operating system is to help programs run - you're never supposed to see it, which helps bring the point home that a kernel is as important as the programs communicating with it.

In 1971, when administrators at MIT wanted to force people in the lab to use passwords on their workstations. RMS wanted to prove that anyone can hack the machine and retrieve the passwords saved on it. In fact, this is exactly what he did - he found all of the users with their passwords and sent an email to them with their password, stating that if they want to they can use a shorter password - Enter. His claim is that any person sitting in front of the computer should be able to fully control it.

The passwords are merely a tool of control for administrators to restrict access to certain parts of the computer. He stated that: "if you can't contribute to a certain software by looking at the codebase - you're being controlled". The FSF came up with what's called a Copyleft license for software distributed under the GNU project, and thus the GNU Public License was born.

Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel.

His inspiration for the kernel came from the SunOS operating system which he had in his university of Helsinki in Finland. The reason he was able to finish his kernel quickly before the GNU project could finish theirs is because his kernel is monolithic.

The GNU project designed at the time the GNU Hurd, which is a microkernel designed to replace the Unix kernel. Since development of a microkernel is inherently more difficult than a monolithic one, Linus was able to finish his kernel quicker.

Eric Raymond's paper The Cathedral and The Bazaar influenced Netscape's decision to go open source - it was VA Linux that first coined that term.

Netscape named their new open source browser project Mozilla.