Chronology

Chronology

See also: Linux adoption

• 1983: Richard Stallman creates the GNU project with the goal of creating a free operating system.
• 1989: Richard Stallman writes the first version of the GNU General Public License.
• 1991: The Linux kernel is publicly announced on 25 August by the 21 year old Finnish student Linus Benedict Torvalds.^[10]
• 1992: The Linux kernel is relicensed under the GNU GPL. The first so called “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: In March Torvalds judges all components of the kernel to be fully matured: he releases version 1.0 of Linux. The XFree86 project contributes a graphic user interface (GUI). In this year the companies 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, and thereby becomes a serious alternative for many companies.
• 1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux. In addition a group of programmers begins developing the graphic user interface KDE.
• 1999: A group of developers begin work on the graphic environment GNOME, which should become a free replacement for KDE, which depended on the then proprietary Qt toolkit. During the year IBM announces an extensive project for the support of Linux.
• 2004: The XFree86 team splits up and joins with the existing X Window standards body to form the X.Org Foundation, which results in a substantially faster development of the X Window 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 now supports OASIS OpenDocument standards in October.
• 2006: Oracle releases its own distribution of Red Hat. Novell and Microsoft announce a cooperation for a better interoperability.
• 2007: Dell starts distributing laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed in them.
• 2011: Version 3.0 of the Linux kernel is released.

[edit]See also

Free software portal

• History of free software