See www.gnu.org.)
Within the next few years, commercial and non-commercial Linux distributions began to emerge.
MCC Interim Linux (www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/MCC/) was
released in the U.K. in February 1992. Slackware Linux (described in Chapter 14), which was first
released in April 1993, is one of the oldest surviving Linux distributions.
Today, Linux can be described as an open source UNIX-like operating system that reflects a combination
of SVID, POSIX, and BSD compliance. Linux continues to aim toward compliance with
POSIX as well as with standards set by the new owner of the UNIX trademark, The Open Group
(www.unix-systems.org).
The non-profit Open Source Development Labs, renamed the Linux Foundation after merging
with the Free Standards Group (www.linux-foundation.org), which employs Linus Torvalds,
manages the direction today of Linux development efforts. Its sponsors list is like a Who??™s Who of
commercial Linux vendors, including IBM, Red Hat, SUSE (Novell), VA Software, HP, Dell, Computer
Associates, Intel, Cisco Systems, and others. The Linux Foundation??™s primary charter is to protect
and accelerate the growth of Linux by providing legal protection and software development standards
for Linux developers.
Although much of the thrust of corporate Linux efforts is on corporate, enterprise computing,
huge improvements are continuing in the desktop arena as well.
Pages:
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121