In 1991, Linus Torvalds, was a student of the University of Helsinki in Finland. Through a class he became interested in UNIX, bought a PC, and worked in Minix, a small UNIX operating system. Unsatisfied with Minix, Linus began to develop the kernel (the heart of the operating system) that eventually became the center of the Linux operating system.

Linus published his work under the GNU General Public License (GPL) as maintained by the Free Software Foundation. The GPL defines the license rights for developers, software vendors, hardware OEMs, and end-users, guaranteeing that it remains Open Source.

The history of Linux is closely connected with the history of the Internet. From the beginning, Linus posted his ideas and the progress of his project to newsgroups on the Internet. Other students and software engineers quickly became interested in what he was doing. Excitement grew with the chance to work on the source code of an operating system that was fully Open Source.

Linux flourished with the contributions of programmers world-wide and by 1994 had grown into a full multi-user, multitasking operating system. Linus and over 15,000 developers world-wide continue to work on Linux development. Today, Linux is the most commercially successful of several free, open-source operating systems.

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