Linux, computer operating system created in the early 1990s by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds and the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

While still a student at the University of Helsinki, Torvalds started developing Linux to create a system similar to MINIX, a UNIX operating system. In 1991 he released version 0.02; Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel, the core of the operating system, was released in 1994. About the same time, American software developer Richard Stallman and the FSF made efforts to create an open-source UNIX-like operating system called GNU. In contrast to Torvalds, Stallman and the FSF started by creating utilities for the operating system first. These utilities were then added to the Linux kernel to create a complete system called GNU/Linux, or, less precisely, just Linux.