Despite its success producing thousands of UNIX utilities, the GNU Project itself failed to produce
one critical piece of code: the kernel. Its attempts to build an open source kernel with the GNU
Hurd project (
www·gnu·org/software/hurd
) were unsuccessful.
BSD Loses Some Steam
The one software project that had a chance of beating out Linux to be the premier open source soft-
ware project was the venerable old BSD project. By the late 1980s, BSD developers at UC Berkeley
realized that they had already rewritten most of the UNIX source code they had received a decade
earlier.
In 1989, University of California (UC) Berkeley distributed its own UNIX-like code as Net/1 and
later (in 1991) as Net/2. Just as UC Berkeley was preparing a complete, UNIX-like operating system
that was free from all AT&T code, AT&T hit them with a lawsuit in 1992. The suit claimed that the
software was written using trade secrets taken from AT&T's UNIX system.
It's important to note here that BSD developers had completely rewritten the copyright-protected
code from AT&T. Copyright was the primary means AT&T used to protect its rights to the UNIX
code. Some believe that if AT&T had patented the concepts covered in that code, there might not
be a Linux (or any UNIX clone) operating system today.
The lawsuit was dropped when Novell bought UNIX System Laboratories from AT&T in 1994. But,
during that critical time period, there was enough fear and doubt about the legality of the BSD
code that the momentum BSD had gained to that point in the fledgling open source community
was lost. Many people started looking for another open source alternative. The time was ripe for a
college student from Finland who was working on his own kernel.
Today, BSD versions are available from three projects: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
People generally characterize FreeBSD as the easiest to use, NetBSD as available on the
most computer hardware platforms, and OpenBSD as fanatically secure. Many security-minded indi-
viduals still prefer BSD over Linux.
Linus Builds the Missing Piece
Linus Torvalds started work on Linux in 1991, while he was a student at the University of Helsinki,
Finland. He wanted to create a UNIX-like kernel so that he could use the same kind of operating
system on his home PC that he used at school. At the time, Linus was using Minix, but he wanted
to go beyond what the Minix standards permitted.
As noted earlier, Linus announced the first public version of the Linux kernel to the comp.os.minix
newsgroup on August 25, 1991, although Linus guesses that the first version didn't actually come
out until mid-September of that year.
Although Torvalds stated that Linux was written for the 386 processor and probably wasn't portable,
others persisted in encouraging (and contributing to) a more portable approach in the early versions
of Linux. By October 5, Linux 0.02 was released with much of the original assembly code rewritten
in the C programming language, which made it possible to start porting it to other machines.
NOTE
NOTE
14
Linux First Steps
Part I
