Article By Luca Grandi.
When open source started off in the 1980’s it sounded like a fairy tale world where good always triumphed, dragons were slain and all stories ended happily ever after. Although not a new concept, free sharing of technological information was a natural progression. If you consider that many things such as recipes, formulas and even patents have been shared since the beginning of time, you’ll realize that this was by no means a new idea.
In 1991, the Linux Kernel, which was started by Linus Torvalds, was released as a freely modifiable source code. Initially the license wasn’t the GPL, but in February 1992 when version 0.12 was released, Torvalds made sure he licensed it under the GNU General Public License. Torvalds was delighted that his kernel attracted much attention from volunteer programmers.
Up until this point no completely free-software operating systems were in existence due to the GNU’s lack of a working kernel, but the development of Torvalds’s kernel proved to be the final piece of the puzzle.
