In the mid to late 1960's Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie went about creating an operating system that would not only be a good environment in which to do programming, but also be a system where a fellowship could form. They had previously experienced a sense of community though remote-access and time-sharing computers, however they imagined a computer that would not only be capable; but would encourage close communication. Later this project was titled “Uniplexed Information and Computer Service” and due to a pun on the earlier “Multics”; UNIX was born.


Although Unix was adopted on a large scale by institutions such as universities and businesses, software costs where becoming dramatically high in the early 1970's, and the operating system was unaffordable for the end user. As well as this, by 1980 technical measures were beginning to be used preventing computer users from being able to see or modify the computer code that made up their software, and copyright laws where extended to computer programs. Frustrated by this change in computer culture, Richard Stallman (a hacker and student at MIT) began the “GNU Project” with the sole purpose to give the computer user freedom to use, share, study and modify, and to do this the most fundamental and important program needed to be written; the operating system.


Richard Stallman had completed many of the programs required (such as the Unix shell, the C compiler, the windows system etc.) for an operating system by the early 1990's, however a few programs; such as some low level device drivers (a computer program that operates or controls a particular piece of hardware or device, in or connected to the computer,) and daemons (a computer program that runs “behind the scenes” and without user intervention, waiting to be activated by the occurrence of a specific event or condition); and most importantly the kernel.

Around the same time, a Finnish programmer by the name of Linus Torvalds took an interest in operating systems, and because he was unhappy with MINIX, a Unix-like operating system which was limited to educational purposes, began to work on his own. This unknowingly began a race between Linus and the GNU project, and because Linus decided to write a traditional monolithic-kernel rather than the more complex micro-kernel that Stallman chose, Linus finished long before Stallman and the GNU project. Licensing his new program under the GPL (GNU's General Public License) not only gave users the freedom to use and modify the kernel, but added the last piece of the puzzle, completing the revolutionary, open-source GNU/Linux operating system, or as its more commonly referred to; Linux.

Today Linux has not just proven itself as a worthy alternative to Microsoft Windows, but has become a social movement that questions the rights of intellectual property, and the freedoms an end user should have in computing. One major reason for this is the openness of its software, encouraging the community to have a DIY attitude towards how their system works, fixing things themselves, and customizing everything to their liking. Unfortunately, this makes many Windows users see Linux as an operating system for computer nerds, believing that a high level of IT understanding is needed. Although it is true that a lack of centralisation and hardware compatibility can put off a new user, the vast number of distributions and good support provide them with a safe and steady platform in which to both work and play.