The history of Linux began in 1991 with the commencement
of a personal project by Finnish student
Linus Torvaldsto create a new free operating system kernel. Since
then, the resulting Linux kernel has
been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial
release of its source code in
1991, it has grown from a small number of C files
under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.2.3 version
in 2015 with more than 18 million lines of source code under the GNU General Public License v2.