What is GNU/Linux?
Volumes could be spent on this topic and still not provide a satisfactory answer. But if you want to play with Linux it’s useful to have a handle on what it is and the philosophy that supports it. So here goes (stop reading if journalistic oversimplifications annoy you).
The free software movement started in earnest with Richard Stallman’s GNU Project, which ultimately sought to grant users the freedom to use, share, study and modify the software running on their computers. To this end, they set out to create a UNIX-like OS called GNU (a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix). Many of the popular UNIX tools were ported to GNU. The GNU project also formalised their ideals in a license, the GNU GPL (General Public License), which included the all important “copyleft” provision, meaning that derivative works must be released under the same license. New software was written too, such as the GNU C Compiler and GNU Emacs, which are sine non qua for today’s Linux distros and text editor arguments respectively.
Despite this progress, what wasn’t finished (and to this day remains unfinished, though not abandoned) was the kernel. The kernel is the hardcore bit of the OS that talks to the hardware, manages memory and basically handles all the complexities your average user never has to think about. Writing a kernel is hard, but in 1991 a young student name of Linus Torvalds took to Usenet to announce he had done just that. By combining his “Linux” kernel and porting the Gnu Tools to it, a new OS was born. It was licensed under the GPL in 1992 and the first “distributions” (back then these were just the kernel bundled with some software and documentation and crude installation mechanism) soon followed.