History of Linux

Not to be confused with Linux kernel version history.

Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments,[1] under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.[2]: 7 [3][4]

  1. ^ Leemhuis, Thorsten. "Die Neuerungen von Linux 4.15". c't.
  2. ^ Corbet, Jonathan; Kroah-Hartman, Greg; McPherson, Amanda. "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring the Work". linuxfoundation.org. January 2018. The Linux Foundation. Archived from the original (lf_pub_whowriteslinux2015.pdf) on March 15, 2015. Retrieved March 15, 2015. The kernel has grown steadily since its first release in 1991, when there were only about 10,000 lines of code. At almost 19 million lines (up from 17 million), the kernel is almost two million lines larger than it was at the time of the previous version of this paper.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference linuxlicense was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference torvalds2000-gplv2only was invoked but never defined (see the help page).