Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
It’s important to realise that the UNIX camp had become increasingly fragmented. More and more vendors were producing their own flavour based on either the System V or BSD variants such as IBM’s AIX, Digital Corporation’s Ultrix, Hewlett Packard’s HP/UX as well as the previously mentioned SunOS and Solaris from Sun Microsystems.
There is a very impressive timeline available showing the history of UNIX from 1969 to the present day which includes Torvald’s Linux kernel. The timeline has it branching from MINIX version 1 in 1991, which itself is shown as branching from UNIX System V. In the sense that both were UNIX-like operating systems for traditional consumer level PC hardware this appears to be correct. However, it is definitely not true to say that Linux evolved out of MINIX or that it built on top of the work invested in that operating system (the same is true in turn for MINIX and its history.)
In fact, this brings us to possibly the most substantial difference between Linux and all the other various Unices – or *NIX releases: the GNU Public License, or GPL.
You can buy a license to use UNIX. By contrast, your right to use Linux is expressly granted. It is freely available, and its underlying source code – every aspect of how it works – is rendered publicly available. Linux follows the Free Software Foundation’s radical licensing model which offers great liberty.
A UNIX license from a commercial vendor has a profit strategy built into it. People offering Linux services may well have profit strategies – like paid support – but Linux itself does not. It is free to anyone who wishes to use it in the ways they see fit. This includes modifying it for their custom needs.
This means that a financial barrier to access is eradicated totally and furthermore there is no risk of vendor lock in like you might experience with UNIX providers. It also means organisations large enough to have their own IT departments always have the choice of doing things themselves or using support providers of their own choosing.
The Free Software Foundation began life with the goal of providing an overall free operating system. They titled this project “GNU” for “GNU’s not UNIX.” Work kicked off with the Emacs text editor and continued through the development of a compiler (gcc) as well as other major pieces of software. In fact, you could pretty much get an existing SunOS (or other) system and swap out everything for GNU equivalents except one fundamental item. What was missing was a GNU kernel.
On the flip side, Torvalds developed a free kernel but did not have text editors or compilers! The two projects naturally fused giving an entire suite of software which was all free of price, freely available and free for use in any desired manner. It is this collective suite which is widely referred to as “Linux” or even GNU/Linux.
David Bass
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