LINUX is nothing but an operating system. An operating system is basically a software layer that lies between the hardware and software applications of your computer to ensure proper communication between the two. Now, a major difference between the commonly used windows operating system to the linux operating system is that, linux is open source. By open source we mean, the user/customer is able to obtain the entire source code using which the system was build. A windows user has access to the software after purchase but is not fed with the source code. Now by open source it only means that the source code of the operating system is available to its users, it does not imply that they have the right to modify it. There are different open source licensing policies that do let them modify the code but it has to be clearly studied and understood well in advance.
Linux was developed between 1991-1994 by a computer student named Linus Torvalds as part of his project. A common misunderstanding people have about linux is that they believe it to be an enhancement of the unix operating system which it is not. Unix again is an open source operating system but has nothing to do with linux. The two are entirely different operating systems developed during the early 90's. Being an open source operating system, a lot of computer geeks across the globe started experimenting with the code and eventually came up with several advanced versions or distributions of linux. Few popularly used linux distros today include Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat Enterprise Linux and many more.
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