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Open source clone of Unix. Created as little more than a research project by Linus Torvalds, Linux has grown to become an extremely popular operating system. Versions of Linux can power devices like handheld PDAs and smartphones to appliance-level devices like NAS and wireless routers, to enterprise-level servers and computing clusters. Linux also challenges Windows on the desktop, though that seems to always be a year or two off.

Also known as “GNU/Linux,” a term evangelized by Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, which makes a lot of the GNU tools used on machines that run Linux. Stallman wants to be sure that the GNU project gets its due; while the OS is Linux, most of the tools used on Linux machines are not Linux, but in fact, GNU.