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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Linux</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../L.html" title="L"/><link rel="previous" href="Linus.html" title="Linus"/><link rel="next" href="lion-food.html" title="lion food"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Linux</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="Linus.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">L</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="lion-food.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="Linux"/><dt xmlns="" id="Linux"><b>Linux</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/lee´nuhks/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/li´nuks/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/li:´nuhks/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and friends
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starting about 1991. The pronunciation <span class="pronunciation">/li´nuhks/</span> is preferred because the
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name ‘Linus’ has an <span class="pronunciation">/ee/</span> sound in Swedish (Linus's family is
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part of Finland's 6% ethnic-Swedish minority) and Linus considers English
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short <span class="pronunciation">/i/</span> to be closer to
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<span class="pronunciation">/ee/</span> than English long <span class="pronunciation">/i:/</span>. This may be the most remarkable
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hacker project in history — an entire clone of Unix for 386, 486 and
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Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the net (ports to
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Alpha and Sparc and many other machines are also in use).</p><p>Linux is what <a href="../G/GNU.html"><i class="glossterm">GNU</i></a> aimed to be, and it relies
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on the GNU toolset. But the Free Software Foundation didn't produce the
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kernel to go with that toolset until 1999, which was too late. Other,
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similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been technically successful
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but never caught fire the way Linux has; as this is written in 2003, Linux
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has effectively swallowed all proprietary Unixes except Solaris and is
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seriously challenging Microsoft. It has already captured 41% of the
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Internet-server market and over 25% of general business servers.</p><p>An earlier version of this entry opined “<span class="quote">The secret of Linux's
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success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to keep the
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development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball
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effect.</span>” Truer than we knew. See
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<a href="../B/bazaar.html"><i class="glossterm">bazaar</i></a>.</p><p>(Some people object that the name ‘Linux’ should be used
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to refer only to the kernel, not the entire operating system. This claim
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is a proxy for an underlying territorial dispute; people who insist on the
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term <span class="firstterm">GNU/Linux</span> want the
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<a href="../F/FSF.html"><i class="glossterm">FSF</i></a> to get most of the credit for Linux because RMS
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and friends wrote many of its user-level tools. Neither this theory nor
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the term <span class="firstterm">GNU/Linux</span> has gained more
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than minority acceptance).</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="Linus.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../L.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="lion-food.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Linus </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> lion food</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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