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Legal aspects

GPLv2 licensing terms edit Initially, Torvalds released Linux under a license which forbade any commercial use. This was changed in version 0.12 by a switch to the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). This license allows distribution and sale of possibly modified and unmodified versions of Linux but requires that all those copies be released under the same license and be accompanied by the complete corresponding source code. Torvalds has described licensing Linux under the GPLv2 as the "best thing I ever did". The Linux kernel is licensed explicitly only under version 2 of the GPL, without offering the licensee the option to choose "any later version", which is a common GPL extension. The official git branch of Torvalds contains documentation that explains the kernel development process to people who want to work with the community and contribute code; it clearly states that "Any contributions which are not covered by a GPLv compatible license will not
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Linux kernel

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The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was conceived and created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386 based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU Operating System, which was created as open source and free software, and based on UNIX as a by-product of the fallout of the Unix wars. Since then, it has spawned a plethora of operating system distributions, commonly also called Linux. Linux is deployed on a wide variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices (including its use in the Android operating system), personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers. It can be tailored for specific architectures and for several usage scenarios using a family of simple commands (that is, without the need of manually editing its source code before compilation); privileged users can also fine-tune kernel parameters at runtime. Most of the Linux kernel code is written
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Architecture

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Linux is a monolithic kernel with a modular design (e.g, it can insert and remove loadable kernel modules at runtime), supporting most features once only available in closed source kernels of non-free operating systems: concurrent computing and (with the availability of enough CPU cores for tasks that are ready to run) even true parallel execution of many processes at once (each of them having one or more threads of execution) on SMP and NUMA architectures; selection and configuration of hundreds of kernel features and drivers (using one of the " make *config " family of commands, before running compilation), modification of kernel parameters before booting (usually by inserting instructions into the lines of the GRUB2 menu), and fine tuning of kernel behavior at run-time (using the sysctl(8) interface to /proc/sys/ ); configuration (again using the make *config commands) and run-time modifications of the policies (via nice(2), setpriority(2) and the family of sched_*(2) s
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