Whoa... so many misconceptions here. 1. Open source software can in fact be sold. 2. Open source/free software can in fact be developed and shipped commercially (eg, GNU Ada) 3. Linux is not an operating system, it is a kernel. The operating system commonly called "Linux" really is GNU/Linux 4. Linus only developed Linux, not the whole GNU/Linux operating system; in fact, he hasn't done anything outside of the kernel! the GNU operating system started in 1983, 1991 was only the date that Linus plugged his kernel (Linux) into the GNU operating system. Linux is not the official GNU kernel, and that's why the resulting operating system is called GNU/Linux instead of just GNU. 5. Linux is not based off of any Unix code. Likewise, GNU for the most part doesn't have any Unix code either, except in cases where it has become public domain or free software, which is rare but it has happened and sometimes been incorporated into GNU (eg, BSD code). http://gnu.org/ http://fsf.org/ http://opensource.org/ http://kernel.org/ k