Linux. Linux ( History[edit] Antecedents[edit] With AT&T being required to license the operating system's source code to anyone who asked (due to an earlier antitrust case forbidding them from entering the computer business),[23] Unix grew quickly and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses.
In 1984, AT&T divested itself of Bell Labs. Free of the legal obligation requiring free licensing, Bell Labs began selling Unix as a proprietary product. Linus Torvalds has said that if the GNU kernel had been available at the time (1991), he would not have decided to write his own.[26] Although not released until 1992 due to legal complications, development of 386BSD, from which NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD descended, predated that of Linux. MINIX, initially released in 1987, is an inexpensive minimal Unix-like operating system, designed for education in computer science, written by Andrew S. Creation[edit] Naming[edit] 5.25-inch floppy discs holding a very early version of Linux. Facebook Ubuntu. Edubuntu. Debian -- The Universal Operating System. The world's most popular free OS | Ubuntu.