A brief Linux history and what a distribution actually is
Linux by itself is an OS kernel; in a car, the equivalent would be the engine. For a complete car, we would also need a chassis, tires, a wheel, doors, seats, a frame, a trunk, and so on. Equally, if we have the knowledge, parts, and tools, we can build a whole OS with the Linux kernel.
In 1983, Richard Stallman created the GNU Foundation to popularize Free and Open Source SW (FOSS). GNU stands for GNU’s Not Unix, and this distinction was because Unix and other kinds of reliable SW were proprietary, closed, and expensive. The GNU Foundation was the first organization to establish a public free SW license called the GNU General Public License (GPL). Nowadays, we have tens of licenses. The five most widely used licenses are GPL 2 and 3 (with all their variants), Apache, Mozilla, BSD, and MIT. Since 1983, hundreds of thousands of people have developed FOSS under those and other licenses.
The GNU collection of free...
