In the early years of computing technology, AT&T's Bell Laboratories codeveloped the first versions of the Unix1 operating system with the University of California at Berkeley. When the system became functional, Bell Laboratories copyrighted the software, not allowing anyone access to the source code, and began licensing only binary machine level distributions of the core Unix components for use in industry. This move aggravated the academic community, which was interested in further developing the platform. The inner workings of their computer science experiments were always obscured by the nebulous "black box" of the Unix operating system, which handled (and sometimes mishandled) every interaction with their programs. Without access to the source code which AT&T guarded, researchers were often unable to trace the cause of problems with their work.
The academic community soon realized that they would have to reinvent the wheel in order to have access to the inner workings of their computers. To this end, a few societies were formed in the mid-80's to completely redevelop the Unix system from scratch and thus free themselves from their dependency on the closed AT&T licensing. These organizations, such as the Free Software Foundation based in Cambridge and the FreeBSD project in Berkeley, managed to produce clones of the Unix operating system and all of its utilities based on open standards such as POSIX.2This time, however, they took special care to define legal safeguards that prevented private corporations from placing copyrights and patents on their software. These kinds of licenses, called public licenses or "copylefts," aimed to keep their work and all derivative work from falling under the exclusive control of companies that might inhibit further development.
Meanwhile, a Finnish graduate student named Linus Torvalds facing the same licensing problems through his research also began developing an operating system. He started by extending upon a decrepit operating system meant for instructional demonstration called MINIX. He placed the source code for the core component of his operating system, or kernel, on the internet for public scrutiny, and eventually a band of students, professors, and freelance programmers joined him in tinkering with and developing the kernel. They named it Linux and decided to license it under the General Public License3 to protect its continued growth. The kernel was coupled with the work from the Free Software Foundation in order to form a complete operating system. The first widely-distributed version was released in 1991, and it has developed rapidly since then. The installed Linux system base is beginning to rival that of Apple's Macintosh, but unlike Apple's, is growing.