Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself.
Unrestricted by design bugs (like GNU) and legal
disputes (like BSD), Linux' high-speed evolution had
been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that
programmers closest to the software code itself didn't
know what to make of it. More compilation album than
operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley
of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc
(the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) to X (a
Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's
Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools
such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon,
which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet
domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The
arch's capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself
a bored-out, super-charged version of Minix. Rather
than building their operating system from scratch,
Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development
team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists
borrow; great artists steal.
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