The penguin that has become the logo for GNU/Linux came about after Linus Torvalds, the original programmer of Linux, was bitten by a penguin at a zoo in Canberra, Australia

In 1969-1970 Kenneth Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others at AT&T Bell Labs began developing a small operating system on a little-used PDP-7. The operating system was soon christened Unix, a pun on an earlier operating system project called MULTICS. In 1972-1973 the system was rewritten in the programming language C, an unusual step that was visionary: due to this decision, Unix was the first widely-used operating system that could switch from and outlive its original hardware. Other innovations were added to Unix as well, in part due to synergies between Bell Labs and the academic community. In 1979, the “seventh edition” (V7) version of Unix was released, the grandfather of all extant Unix systems. After this point, the history of Unix becomes somewhat convoluted. The academic community, led by Berkeley, developed a variant called the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), while AT&T continued developing Unix under the names “System III” and later “System V”. In the late 1980’s through early 1990’s the “wars” between these two major strains raged. After many years each variant adopted many of the key features of the other.

Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds: to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2.

GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL). Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project GNU is also the project within which the free software concept originated. Richard Stallman, the founder of the project, views GNU as a "technical means to a social end". Relatedly, Lawrence Lessig states in his introduction to the second edition of Stallman's book Free Software, Free Society that in it Stallman has written about "the social aspects of software and how Free Software can create community and social justice".Development of the GNU operating system was initiated by Richard Stallman while he worked at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was called the GNU Project, and was publicly announced on September 27, 1983,

Linus Torvalds inus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name "Freax" for about half of a year. Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux", but initially dismissed it as too egotistical. In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name. So, he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds.

Torvalds first published the Linux kernel under its own licence, which had a restriction on commercial activity. The software to use with the kernel was software developed as part of the GNU project licensed under the GNU General Public License, a free software license. The first release of the Linux kernel, Linux 0.01, included a binary of GNU's Bash shell.

• 1991: The Linux kernel is publicly announced on 25 August by the 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Benedict Torvalds.


• 1992: The Linux kernel is relicensed under the GNU GPL. The first Linux distributions are created.


• 1993: Over 100 developers work on the Linux kernel. With their assistance the kernel is adapted to the GNU environment, which creates a large spectrum of application types for Linux. The oldest currently existing Linux distribution, Slackware, is released for the first time. Later in the same year, the Debian project is established. Today it is the largest community distribution.


• 1994: Torvalds judges all components of the kernel to be fully matured: he releases version 1.0 of Linux. The XFree86 project contributes a graphical user interface (GUI). Commercial Linux distribution makers Red Hat and SUSE publish version 1.0 of their Linux distributions.


• 1995: Linux is ported to the DEC Alpha and to the Sun SPARC. Over the following years it is ported to an ever-greater number of platforms.


• 1996: Version 2.0 of the Linux kernel is released. The kernel can now serve several processors at the same time using symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and thereby becomes a serious alternative for many companies.


• 1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is first published as an essay (later as a book), resulting in Netscape publicly releasing the source code to its Netscape Communicator web browser suite. Netscape's actions and crediting of the essay brings Linux's open source development model to the attention of the popular technical press. In addition a group of programmers begins developing the graphical user interface KDE.


• 1999: A group of developers begin work on the graphical environment GNOME, destined to become a free replacement for KDE, which at the time, depended on the then proprietary Qt toolkit. During the year IBM announces an extensive project for the support of Linux. Version 2.2 of the Linux kernel is released.


• 2000: Dell announces that it is now the No. 2 provider of Linux-based systems worldwide and the first major manufacturer to offer Linux across its full product line.


• 2001: Version 2.4 of the Linux kernel is released.


• 2002: The media reports that "Microsoft killed Dell Linux"


• 2003: Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel is released.


• 2004: The XFree86 team splits up and joins with the existing X standards body to form the X.Org Foundation, which results in a substantially faster development of the X server for Linux.


• 2005: The project openSUSE begins a free distribution from Novell's community. Also the project OpenOffice.org introduces version 2.0 that then started supporting OASIS OpenDocument standards.


• 2006: Oracle releases its own distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Novell and Microsoft announce cooperation for a better interoperability and mutual patent protection.


• 2007: Dell starts distributing laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed on them.


• 2009: Red Hat's market capitalization equals Sun's, interpreted as a symbolic moment for the "Linux-based economy".


• 2011: Version 3.0 of the Linux kernel is released.


• 2012: The aggregate Linux server market revenue exceeds that of the rest of the Unix market.


• 2013: Google's Linux-based Android claims 75% of the smartphone market share, in terms of the number of phones shipped.


• 2014: Ubuntu claims 22,000,000 users.


• 2015: Version 4.0 of the Linux kernel is released.


• 2019: Version 5.0 of the Linux kernel is released.