Ubuntu Joe's Café: A Little His'tray . . .

Just for the sake of context, here's a seriously brief history of Linux (I'm talkin' abridged):

The history of Linux is closely tied to that of GNU. Plans for GNU were made in 1983 and in September of that year they were announced publicly when Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project. GNU was to be a complete Unix-like operating system composed entirely of free software. Software development work began in January 1984. By the beginning of the 1990s, the project had produced or collected most of the necessary components of this system, including libraries, compilers, text editors, and a Unix shell. Thus the GNU mid-level portions of the operating system were almost complete. The upper level could be supplied by the X Window System, but the lower level, which consisted of a kernel, device drivers, system-level utilities and daemons, was still mostly lacking. In 1990, the GNU project began developing the GNU Hurd kernel, based on the Mach microkernel, but development proved unexpectedly difficult and proceeded slowly, and to date has only been marginally usable.

In 1991, work on the Linux kernel began by Linus Torvalds while attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally created the Linux kernel as a replacement for the non-free Minix kernel. Although dependent on the Minix userspace at first, work from both Linux kernel developers and the GNU project allowed Linux to work with GNU components. Thus Linux filled the last major gap in running a complete, fully functional operating system built from free software.

Today, Torvalds continues to direct the development of the kernel. Stallman heads the Free Software Foundation, which in turn develops the GNU components. Finally, third-party non-GNU components are developed by individuals and corporations. These third-party components comprise a vast body of work and may include both kernel modules and userland applications and libraries. Linux vendors combine and distribute the kernel, GNU components, and non-GNU components with additional package management software in the form of Linux distributions.

All right, look, I totally stole that from Wikipedia, (because, I'm lazy,) so I hope it's accurate . . . it gives you the basic idea anyway . . . I urge you to go check out the entry, though, it's all very interesting how GNU/Linux and the different distros came to be . . .