I think there are a very few persons that haven't heard about Linux or UNIX, but does this majority knows difference between Linux and UNIX? Well, the simple answer is NO. In this article we will try to explain the few differences between those two operating systems.
Brief History
UNIX was firstly known as UNICS and it was created 1969. by group of AT&T Bell Labs employees. The name was trademarked to UNIX in the early 1970s, and has since been
commonly referred to a Unix, with small caps. The platform began as a
multi-tasking operating system with a command line interpreter and a
couple of small utility programs, far from the PC as we know it today.
In 1991, Linus Torvlads, a young student, began working on Minix, a
Unix-like system whose code was free available under the GNU GPL. Out
of this project came the first Linux kernel, which included various
libraries and utilities from the GNU (GNU's Not Unix) OS to create a
usable operating system. Linux was released as open-source software
under the GNU GPL, allowing the underlying source code to be freely used
and modified.
The differences
Linux OS is very popular in small and medium size environments for mail servers, web servers, DNS servers, etc... Unix is more obvious and better choice in large and demanding environments where we have multiple systems interconnected, like mobile network platforms for example, where many multiple processes and tasks must be driven simultaneously.
Second major difference is in cost. Linux is open source free software and it has many contributors and large community. So there are many distributions, like: Debian, Fedora, Backtrack, Red Hat, etc... On the other hand, Unix is not free, depending on version plus hardware; high-end servers can cost up to 500,000 $.
Unix at this point has three main contributors IBM, Sun and HP. Their versions of Unix: AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are intensively upgraded with Linux kernel features to be more competative on market.
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