11-17-2008
The reason, as has been mentioned, is that Linux is not a product from one company. It is free, both as in "costs nothing" and also that you are free to change or modify Linux in any way, as long as you provide the technical differences back to the community that gave you the ability to use Linux in the first place.
There are, as such, multiple distributions of Linux. They take the same basics and then package them into distinct operating environments.
Think of it this way. If you were to go to a store and see Maier's Bread, Wonder Bread, Stroehmann bread and "Generic" bread, all containing the same basics of wheat flour, but tasting slightly different due to texture, recipe, etc, you would see that while they may not be necessary, they are distinct and different.
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LIBC(7) Linux Programmer's Manual LIBC(7)
NAME
libc - overview of standard C libraries on Linux
DESCRIPTION
The term "libc" is commonly used as a shorthand for the "standard C library", a library of standard functions that can be used by all C
programs (and sometimes by programs in other languages). Because of some history (see below), use of the term "libc" to refer to the stan-
dard C library is somewhat ambiguous on Linux.
glibc
By far the most widely used C library on Linux is the GNU C Library <http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/>, often referred to as glibc. This
is the C library that is nowadays used in all major Linux distributions. It is also the C library whose details are documented in the rel-
evant pages of the man-pages project (primarily in Section 3 of the manual). Documentation of glibc is also available in the glibc manual,
available via the command info libc. Release 1.0 of glibc was made in September 1992. (There were earlier 0.x releases.) The next major
release of glibc was 2.0, at the beginning of 1997.
The pathname /lib/libc.so.6 (or something similar) is normally a symbolic link that points to the location of the glibc library, and exe-
cuting this pathname will cause glibc to display various information about the version installed on your system.
Linux libc
In the early to mid 1990s, there was for a while Linux libc, a fork of glibc 1.x created by Linux developers who felt that glibc develop-
ment at the time was not sufficing for the needs of Linux. Often, this library was referred to (ambiguously) as just "libc". Linux libc
released major versions 2, 3, 4, and 5 (as well as many minor versions of those releases). For a while, Linux libc was the standard C
library in many Linux distributions. However, notwithstanding the original motivations of the Linux libc effort, by the time glibc 2.0 was
released, it was clearly superior to Linux libc, and all major Linux distributions that had been using Linux libc soon switched back to
glibc. (Since this switch occurred over a decade ago, man-pages no longer takes care to document Linux libc details. Nevertheless, the
history is visible in vestiges of information about Linux libc that remain in some manual pages, in particular, references to libc4 and
libc5.)
Other C libraries
There are various other less widely used C libraries for Linux. These libraries are generally smaller than glibc, both in terms of fea-
tures and memory footprint, and often intended for building small binaries, perhaps targeted at development for embedded Linux systems.
Among such libraries are uClibc (http://www.uclibc.org/) and dietlibc (http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/). Details of these libraries are gen-
erally not covered by the man-pages project.
SEE ALSO
syscalls(2), feature_test_macros(7), man-pages(7), standards(7)
COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.53 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2012-08-05 LIBC(7)