Malaysian Open Source Centre

The Linux kernel or Linux is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like operating systems. These are popularly termed Linux operating systems and the name is also used for the various Linux distributions built on top of the operating system.

The Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) and developed by contributors worldwide; Linux is one of the most prominent examples of Open Source software.[4]

The Linux kernel was initially conceived and created by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds in 1991. Early on, the MINIX community contributed code and ideas to the Linux kernel. At the time, the GNU Project had created many of the components required for a free software operating system, but its own kernel, GNU Hurd, was incomplete and unavailable. The BSD operating system had not yet freed itself from legal encumbrances. This meant that despite the limited functionality of the early versions, Linux rapidly accumulated developers and users who adopted code from those projects for use with the new operating system.[5] Today the Linux kernel has received contributions from thousands of programmers.