29 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
29 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
Linux
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/leenuhks/ , /linuks/ , not , /li:nuhks/ , n. The free Unix workalike
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created by Linus Torvalds and friends starting about 1991. The pronunciation
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/linuhks/ is preferred because the name Linus has an /ee/ sound in Swedish
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(Linus's family is part of Finland's 6% ethnic-Swedish minority) and Linus
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considers English short /i/ to be closer to /ee/ than English long /i:/.
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This may be the most remarkable hacker project in history an entire clone of
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Unix for 386, 486 and Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over
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the net (ports to Alpha and Sparc and many other machines are also in use).
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Linux is what GNU aimed to be, and it relies on the GNU toolset. But the
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Free Software Foundation didn't produce the kernel to go with that toolset
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until 1999, which was too late. Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and
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NetBSD have been technically successful but never caught fire the way Linux
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has; as this is written in 2003, Linux has effectively swallowed all
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proprietary Unixes except Solaris and is seriously challenging Microsoft. It
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has already captured 41% of the Internet-server market and over 25% of
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general business servers. An earlier version of this entry opined The secret
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of Linux's success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to
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keep the development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a
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snowball effect. Truer than we knew. See bazaar. (Some people object that
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the name Linux should be used to refer only to the kernel, not the entire
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operating system. This claim is a proxy for an underlying territorial
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dispute; people who insist on the term GNU/Linux want the FSF to get most of
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the credit for Linux because RMS and friends wrote many of its user-level
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tools. Neither this theory nor the term GNU/Linux has gained more than
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minority acceptance).
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