The Unix operating system was also developed on a cooperative basis by AT&T
with the active support of many universities and research establishments.
Many of the early Unix contributors were disappointed when AT&T began in
the late 1970's and 1980's, to enforce their copyright terms over the use
and distribution of Unix. This eventually resulted in the long and bitter
legal battle between AT&T (and subsequently Novell who bought the Unix
copyrights from AT&T in 1991) and the University of California at Berkeley.
In a partial response to this problem of individual control of a public
software development project, The Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA has, since 1984, supported Richard
Stallman's efforts to launch a movement in the software development
community to support the development of free software. This resulted in the
establishment of The Free Software Foundation (the FSF), and its GNU
project. The name GNU follows in an early Unix tradition of using recursive
acronyms as program names, and stands for Gnu's Not Unix.
The FSF continues to be head-quartered at MIT, and has enjoyed amazing
success over the last decade with products like GNU C, GNU C++, Emacs, and
many other products, many of which form substantial and key building blocks
of the Linux operating system. Richard Stallman insists, with
some justification, that Linux should correctly be known as a GNU system.
There are many other "free software" licenses that some of the code in Red
Hat Linux has been licensed under. The most popular of these are the
University of California at Berkeley BSD License whereby the copyright
holder remains the registered owner but where no restrictions on further
distribution are imposed on the user of the code.
Also coming from MIT, but not related to the FSF or the GPL, is the X
Consortium, which is a Unix industry sponsored effort to build and maintain
the X Window System. In turn, a group called the XFree86 Project has taken
on the responsibility to port the X Window System to the Intel platform.
We have included copies of each of these licenses in the appendix of this
manual for your convenience. Linux is continuing to progress very
rapidly because of the contributions of this world wide development effort,
to which you and your company or school are encouraged to contribute.