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Full Discussion: Is UNIX an open source OS ?
Operating Systems Linux Fedora Is UNIX an open source OS ? Post 302910075 by sreyan32 on Tuesday 22nd of July 2014 09:36:54 AM
Old 07-22-2014
Is UNIX an open source OS ?

Hi everyone,
I know the following questions are noobish questions but I am asking them because I am confused about the basics of history behind UNIX and LINUX.

Ok onto business, my questions are-:

  1. Was/Is UNIX ever an open source operating system ?
  2. If UNIX was closed source (as Wikipedia states as "historically closed source") then is LINUX a reverse engineered version of UNIX ?
    I mean if UNIX was closed source how did Linus Torvalds create a "UNIX-like" OS called LINUX without having access to the source code of a closed source OS. The only possible explanation seems reverse engineering UNIX just like ReactOS is a reversed engineered binary compatible version of Windows.
  3. Now this seems a little odd to ask. Is LINUX actually an OS ? Or is Linux just a kernel ? I am asking this because the Debian OS which I use can work on Linux, FreeBSD and I think the GNU Hurd kernel (I have no idea what it is by the way). Wikipedia defines Linux as an OS while I have never used an OS called Linux but I have used distros like "Fedora", "Debian", etc.

Okay that's about it for now. Please don't flame me, I am really confused between the basics here.

Thanks in advance.
 

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WIKIPEDIA2TEXT(1)					      General Commands Manual						 WIKIPEDIA2TEXT(1)

NAME
wikipedia2text -- displays Wikipedia entries on the command line SYNOPSIS
wikipedia2text [-BCnNoOpPsSuU] [-b prog] [ {-c | -i | -I } patt] [-l lang] [-W base-url] Query wikipedia2text -o [-b prog] [-l lang] Query wikipedia2text [-h] wikipedia2text -v wikipedia2text -r DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the wikipedia2text command. wikipedia2text fetches and renders Wikipedia articles using a text-mode web-browser (currently recognises elinks, links2, links, lynx and w3m) and display the text of the article on STDOUT respectively in a pager. OPTIONS
The program recognizes the following command line options: -b prog Use program prog as browser. -B Do not use browser configured via configuration file or environment. -c patt, -I patt Colorize case-sensitive pattern patt in output. -C, -N Colorize output. -h Show help and a summary of options. -i patt Colorize case-insensitive pattern patt in output. -l lang use Wikipedia in language lang. See the Wikipedia Languages entry elsewhere in this document. -n Do not colorize output. -o Open the Wikipedia page in the browser. -O Do not open the Wikipedia page in the browser. -p Use a pager (set by default). -P Don't use a pager. -r Display a random Wikipedia article. -s Display only the summary of the Wikipedia article. -S Display the full content of the Wikipedia article and not only the summary. -u Just print the URL of the Wikipedia page and exit. -U Display the full content of the Wikipedia article and not only print the URL of the page. -v Show version number. -W base-url use base-url as base URL for wikipedia (e.g. use a different wiki), querying this URL will happen by appending the search term. ENVIRONMENT
The following environment variables are recognized: ABROWSER Browser to use as default instead of to found or configured web browser. IGNCASE Default value for case-sensitivity of colorizing the output. Can be set to "true" or "false". LOCAL Default value for language in which Wikipedia should be used. See the Wikipedia Languages entry elsewhere in this document. OUTPUTURL Determines, if wikipedia2text should display only the URL of the Wikipedia article by default. Can be set to "true" or "false". PAGER Default value for pager to use. Can also be set to "true", in which case, wikipedia2text tries to figure out the appropriate pager, or "false", which means not to use a pager at all. SHORT Determines, if wikipedia2text should display only the summary of the Wikipedia article by default. Can be set to "true" or "false". USEBROWSER Determines, if wikipedia2text should open the Wikipedia page via openurl in the globally set default browser, i.e. Firefox or Konqueror, by default. Can be set to "true" or "false". FILES
$HOME/.wikipedia2textrc Will be sourced from wikipedia2text on startup. Should contain variable assignments. The same variables as for the environment are recognised. WIKIPEDIA LANGUAGES
wikipedia2text currently supports the following Wikipedia languages: af Cape Dutch (Afrikaans) als Alemannic ca Catalan cs Czech da Danish de German en English eo Esperanto es Spanish fi Finnish fr French hu Hungarian ia Interlingua is Islandic it Italian la Latin lb Luxembourgian nds Low German nl Dutch nn, no Norwegian (Nynorsk and Bokmal) pl Polish pt Portuguese rm Rhaeto-Romanic ro Romanian simple Simple English sk Slovak sl Slovenian sv Swedish tr Turkish SEE ALSO
elinks(1), links(1), links2(1), lynx(1), w3m(1) AUTHOR
wikipedia2text was written by Christian Brabandt <cb@256bit.org>. Patches also from Axel Beckert <abe@deuxchevaux.org>. This manual page was written by Axel Beckert <abe@deuxchevaux.org> for the Debian system (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 2 any later ver- sion published by the Free Software Foundation. On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL. HISTORY
wikipedia2text was first released by Christian Brabandt on in his blog (link to URL http://blog.256bit.org/archives/126-Wikipedia-in-der- Shell.html) with as script named wiki. Some users may find it useful to create an alias with that name for speeding up the typing of a wikipedia2text command if no other command of that name is present. OTHER INFO
The current version of wikipedia2text should be available at on Christian Brabandt's website (link to URL http://www.256bit.org/~chris- bra/wiki) . WIKIPEDIA2TEXT(1)
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