Early Unix systems were mainly commercial commodities like most software for sale; to run the operating system, you generally had to pay for that right. In 1984 an engineer named Richard Stallman began work on the GNU Project, which was an effort to create an operating system that was like Unix and that could be distributed and used […]
File systems in the UNIX family have never been very well organized. Various incompatible naming conventions are used simultaneously, and different types of files are scattered randomly around the namespace. In many cases, files are divided by function and not by how likely they are to change, making it difficult to upgrade the operating system. […]