What is the difference between Unix and Linux?

Answer 1

That's a question that will boil down to the problem of defining unix.

Unix started in 1969 and Throughout it's live evolved to what is today
The BSD crowd: FreeBSD, net BSD and OpenBSD;
Solaris, AIX, HPUX and a few more. Along the way we saw also sgi's IRIX, AT&T's system V based systems, SCOs variants, even a Microsoft made lookalike called XENIX. And many more.

Linux was originally only a kernel (only one part of the OS) leaning on the Gnu project for the rest of the OS. It was made by a student from Finland Linus Torvalds. It's certainly more a look-alike of unix than e.g. XENIX ever was.

But since you need to define unix, it depends on the definition if you need to include Linux in the unix family or not. Personally I include it, and hence there's little difference to tell as Linux is one possible form of unix.

Modern definitions might lean toward POSIX, but that would exclude all of the origins of Unix from being unix, so you'd need something to include then and then Linux well and clearly falls within the same use as they do.

Answer 2

The differences are very slim.

Torvalds created linux because he thought that the Unix platform was a good one and it should be free, hence he created the Linux kernel, which companies and orginizations used to create Linux distributions like Slackware and Ubuntu. Generally the main difference is the cost. Most unix systems you always pay for but for linux most versions are free but you pay for the support.

Answer 3

unix-server
linux-OS

Answer 4

http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/loginMembersOnly/1,289498,sid39_cid583148,00.html?NextURL=http%3A//searchopensource.techtarget.com/ateQuestionNResponse/0%2C289625%2Csid39_cid583148_tax296080%2C00.html