A Voyage to UNIX Distros

User can study,change and redistribute any application or software or even OS to any body that are already developed under free software license....

OK before we start, we need to review its history...

Where does this comes from...

Actually it has been originated by group of scholars [individuals] from university of california, Berkeley under code named BSD [Berkeley Software Distribution].From which the UNIX distributions has been evolved. UNIX OS on the other hand developed by AT&T employess in Bell Labs.

What is the current growth status of this distributions...

Wow..its huge and extra ordinary growth and picked up in the market late 90's...That's the time where india get to know about computers exist in the world..Today we have seen in the ads,campaign or even through our freinds talk about linux. A linux is an another OS which has emerged in WEST during the times where computer means WINDOWS OS to indians..

But these guys silently created the revolution in OS, LINUX is distributed under GNU GPL license.Where any body can take it,read,modify and redistribute to the same community.

It's like 'we provide the code you give me the improved code'.

Who's is the owner for opensource...

Well no body can claim its ownership....since its open source means to every body...but certain distros [here after for distributions] has been released under commercial license ex: Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake etc..

Acronyms with expansion:

GNU - Generally Not Unix
GPL - General Public License

LINUX - An OS named after and its kernel maintained by a berkeley scholar and well known hacker in opensource named 'LINUS TORVALDIS'.

What do you mean by kernel...

A kernel represents core of an opensource OS....It's like DOS in windows....In fact MAC OS is built on another BSD and its kernel name is 'DARWIN' on top of it MAC OS has been built.