Linux grew within a culture of free exchange of ideas and software. Like Unix -- the operating system on which Linux is based -- the focus was on keeping communications open among software developers. Getting the code to work was the goal and the Internet was the primary communications medium. Keeping the software free and redistributable was a means to that goal. What, then, were the conditions that made the world ripe for a computer system such as Linux?
In the 1980s and 1990s, while Microsoft flooded the world with personal computers running DOS and Windows operating systems, power users demanded more from an operating system. They ached for systems that could run on networks, support many users at once (multiuser), and run many programs at once (multitasking). DOS (disk operating system) and Windows didn't cut it.
Unix, on the other hand, grew out of a culture where technology was king and marketing people were, well, hard to find. Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was a think tank where ideas came first and profits were somebody else's problem. A quote from Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of Unix and designer of the C programming language, in a 1980 lecture on the evolution of Unix , sums up the spirit that started Unix . He was commenting on both his hopes and those of his colleagues for the Unix project after a similar project called Multics had just failed:
In that spirit, the first source code of Unix was distributed free to universities. Like Linux, the availability of Unix source code made it possible for a diverse population of software developers to make their own enhancements to Unix and share them with others.
By the early 1980s, Unix development moved from the organization in Murray Hill to a more commercially oriented development laboratory in Summit, New Jersey (a few miles down the road). During that time, Unix began to find commercial success as the computing system of choice for applications such as AT&T's telephone switching equipment, for supercomputer applications such as modeling weather patterns, and for controlling NASA space projects.
Major computer hardware vendors licensed the Unix source code to run on their computers. To try to create an environment of fairness and community to its OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), AT&T began standardizing what these different ports of Unix had to be able to do to still be called Unix . To that end, compliance with POSIX standards and the AT&T Unix System V Interface Definition (SVID) were specifications UNIX vendors could use to create compliant Unix systems. Those same documents also served as road maps for the creation of Linux.
Elsewhere, the Unix source code that had been distributed to universities had taken on a life of its own. The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) began life in the late 1970s as patches to the AT&T Unix source code from students and staff at the University of California at Berkeley. Over the years, the AT&T code was rewritten and BSD became freely distributed, with offshoot projects such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD still available. Linux has been described as a Unix-like operating system that reflects a combination of SVID, POSIX, and BSD compliance. Linux continues to aim toward POSIX compliance, as well as compliance with standards set by the new owner of the Unix trademark, The Open Group (www.unix.orgwww.osdl.org), which includes Linus Torvalds on its staff and whose members include most of the major commercial vendors, and the Linux Standard Base (www.linuxbase.org), which coordinates compatibility among Linux distributions.
Chapter table of contents
- Chapter introduction
- Introducing Fedora and RHEL
- What is Linux?
- Linux's roots in Unix
- Common Linux features
- Primary advantages of Linux
- What is Fedora?
- Why choose Fedora?
- The culture of free software
This is an excerpt from Chapter 1, 'An Overview of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux,' from the book Fedora 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Bible by Christopher Negus and courtesy of Wiley.