(this page best viewed with...well, just about anything, really. Although composed with Netscape in mind, it should work just fine with MSIE or Lynx, as well)
Linux is many different things to many different people. If you're an old time Unix weenie, then Linux is a return to Unix's roots as a community-supported operating system. If you're one of the many who find Microsoft's software and business practices hard to accept, Linux is an alternative that's becoming more and more viable even for casual computer users. If you're a FAN of Microsoft, Linux represents the ultimate adversary, an operating system project predicated on community involvment and Open Source.
From a technical standpoint, Linux is what I like to call "Marsupial Unix". It fills a similar evolutionary niche to the operating systems that can legally call themselves Unix®, but contains absolutely no code that can trace its "genetic" lineage back to AT&T or its successors. It's written entirely from the ground up, but with an aim toward POSIX compliance (POSIX being the suite of standards that define a Unix-like system).
The "kernel", at least as officially distributed, also contains absolutely no code that can be trace back to any other commercial project or product. The source code is entirely "fresh", and has copyrighted and licensed back to the general public under the Free Software Foundation's General Public License. This means, in a nutshell, that anyone in the world can grab the source code and do whatever they like with it, as long as they don't try to sell it as their own work as a binary-only product.
[MORE TO COME]DISCLAIMER: This web page is not in any way an official service offering of Public Communiations, Inc. Similarly, the author is not an official representative of the management of AetherWorks Corporation. I am the Mikey. I speak for myself.
This page is a production of Michael Scott Shappe, who is solely responsible for its content.