August 25, 1991 after five months of development, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced in Teleecification Comp.OS.Minix on the creation of a working prototype of the new Linux operating system, for which the completion of porting Bash 1.08 and GCC 1.40 was noted. The first public issue of Linux was presented on September 17. The core 0.0.1 had a compressed form and contained about 10 thousand lines of the source code. The modern Linux core has more than 30 million lines of code. According to a study conducted in 2010 by order of the European Union, the approximate cost of developing from scratch, similar to the modern Linux core, would be more than a billion US dollars (the calculation was made when there were 13 million lines of code in the nucleus), according to brigy estimates-more than 3 billion.
Linux core was created under the impression of the Minix operating system, which did not suit Linus with its limited license. Subsequently, when Linux became a well -known project, the ill -wishers tried to blame Linus of direct copying of the code of some Minix subsystems. The attack was repelled by Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of Minix, who instructed one of the students to conduct a detailed comparison of the Minix code and the first public versions of Linux. results Research showed only four insignificant coincidences of code blocks due to the requirements of Posix and ANSI C C .
Initially, Linus decided to name the Freax core, from the words “free”, “freeak” and x (unix). But the nucleus received the name “Linux” with the light hand of Ari Lemmke, who, at the request of Linus, placed the core on the university FTP server, calling the directory with the archive not “Freax”, as Torvalds asked, but “Linux”. It is noteworthy that the entrepreneurial businessman William Della Croce managed to register the Linux trademark and wanted to collect deductions over time, but later changed his mind and transferred all the rights to the brand of Linus. The official talisman of Linux-Jadra, Penguin Tux, was chosen as a result of competition , held in 1996. The TUX name is deciphered as Torvalds Unix.
The dynamics of the growth of the code base (number of lines of the source code) of the nucleus:
- 0.0.1 – September 1991, 10 thousand lines of code;
- 1.0.0 – March 1994, 176 thousand lines of code;
- 1.2.0 – March 1995, 311 thousand lines of code;
- 2.0.0 – June 1996, 778 thousand lines of code;
- 2.2.0 – January 1999, 1.8 million lines of code;
- 2.4.0 – January 2001, 3.4 million lines of code;
- 2.6.0 – December 2003, 5.9 million lines of code;
- 2.6.28 – December 2008, 10.2 million lines of code;
- 2.6.35 – August 2010, 13.4 million lines of code;
- 3.0 – August 2011, 14.6 million lines of code.
- 3.5 – July 2012, 15.5 million lines of code.
- 3.10 – July 2013, 15.8 million lines of code;
- 3.16 – August 2014, 17.5 million lines of code;
- 4.1 – June 2015, 19.5 million lines of code;
- 4.7 – July 2016, 21.7 million lines of code;
- 4.12 – July 2017, 24.1 million lines of code;
- 4.18 – August 2018, 25.3 million lines of code.
- 5.2 – July 2019, 26.55 million lines of code.