Consolidation as an industry trend - Expert Consolidation in Oracle Database 12c - page 21

about freedom of information. One of the most prominent is Richard Stallman who started the GNU project in the
same year: 1983. GNU is a recursive acronym and stands for GNU. It is not UNIX. The aim of the GNU project was to
create a free version of the UNIX operating system, including a kernel as well as the necessary command line utilities.
While the latter effort was successful, the endeavor to create a kernel was severely impacted by the release of
Linux-but I am getting ahead of myself. Freedom in the GNU-context means that anyone should be able to use the
software without paying a fee or license charge, and the source code had to be provided as well for modification or
study. While this sounds radical to many vendors, it goes even further. The most interesting aspect of the free software
ideal was the license under which the software was distributed. The GNU General Public License implements
a “copyleft,” instead of “copyright.” Instead of keeping all the power in the software producer's hand, the GPL as it
is generally known reverses this concept. Software based on the GPL also has to be placed under the GPL, which
prompted some observers to call it viral. It has however not prevented some of the most advanced and widely spread
applications to be written and distributed under the GPL.
But before that could happen some other important events took place. In the early 1980s UNIX had split into
many different ports, but all had in common that they were either BSD-based or based on the original sources from
AT&T/Bell. Commercial versions of UNIX also began to appear throughout the 1980s: SunOS, Xenix OS, and others
were based on BSD, while Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and IRIX were by and large descendants of SysV. The BSD Unix variant
went through a difficult phase, when AT&T sued the University for copyright infringement. The claim was based on
the fact that BSD was initially based on the free Unix sources from AT&T. The lawsuit prevented wider adoption of the
Berkeley Software Distribution.
An attempt to merge the BSD-base provided by SunOS and the SysV branch of UNIX in System V Release 4
caused enough aggravation between vendors not part of the deal to form a counter-coalition. The to-ing and
fro-ing would result in what is today referred to as the UNIX wars. Fractionalism between various vendor-coalitions
lasted until the mid-1990s when the Open Group was formed. This consortium, which is very active still today, has
published the Single Unix Specification and holds the UNIX trademark. Only systems meeting the requirements are
allowed to be called UNIX systems. All others are UNIX-like operating systems.
Most UNIX systems discussed so far require special hardware to run which made them inaccessible for most
outside of universities. With the proliferation of the personal computer and its increasing capabilities towards the
mid-1990s users had the technical requirements to run Unix systems on their hardware, except that there were very
few ports to the Intel IA32 architecture. This would change soon.
Enter Linus
With all of this background information, most notably about System V Unix, the Berkeley Software distribution
and the GNU/free software movement it is possible to explain the Linux phenomenon. Linus Torvalds, at the time
a student at the University of Helsinki, started developing an operating system to exploit his Intel 80386 hardware.
Making use of the now almost forgotten Usenet, he posted his ideas to the Minix user group asking for opinions about
his project and he got plenty. Interestingly the software was developed in a very distributed, de-centralized way by lots
of interested individuals around the world. Linus was, and for most aspects still is, the maintainer of the kernel code.
He incorporated a lot of these ideas to the kernel and over time the project got a lot of momentum. The code was
eventually released on an FTP server, at a time where a full operating system code tree wasn't available.
When early versions of Linux were developed, they greatly benefited from the work done by the GNU project
initiated by Richard Stallman. Linux was the missing piece in the puzzle: when the GNU project set out, not only did
they want to write the essential utilities, but also a free kernel, codenamed “Hurd.” The first few Linux versions saw
a lot of the GNU utilities ported to them, which was essential in making Linux more user accessible. This is also the
reason Linux really should be called GNU/Linux.
Initially Linux was developed under Torvalds' own license, but was eventually put under the GPL. That move to
the GPL was a great benefit to the free software movement. Very much like the Internet in its early days, there was a
purist approach to Linux and commercial interest was not the driving factor behind development. In fact, it took a
long time before companies could start to make money off of Linux. Most of them do this by bundling up software
in what's referred to as Linux distribution. To overcome skepticism in the industry, today's commercially successful
pioneers Red Hat and SUSE created their Enterprise Distributions. Whereas Red Hat is going from strength to