Lately I see a lot of confusion between Linux and Unix, since many people believe that it is really the same or that one depends on the other, when obviously it is not.
You've probably heard the phrase "linux is not unix" or the recursive acronym for GNU that stands for "GNU is Not Unix." Already only with this we can know that it is not the same. We are going to go further and explain the main differences between the two.
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It was born in the early 70s by developers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. It was created at Bell Labs, which belong to the famous AT&T company. It was created as an operating system to manage servers, being an operating system where the commands have almost all the prominence.
The Linux Kernel It was created by Linus Torvalds in the early 90's. The kernel was created based on Unix and Linus had the help of other free software greats like Richard Stallman. From that year on, many Linux-based distributions began to be created, as well as many desktops.
Ownership and copyright
Unix it is a proprietary system that cannot be modified, property of the AT&T company that is the only one that has permission to modify and update it.
As we all know, Linux is under the GNU license and therefore, the Linux kernel is completely free and free and anyone can modify the source code, which is available to everyone.
Utility and use
The main utility of Unix is its use on server systems, with the exception of the MacOS X operating system that isIt's a desktop operating system. In the case of server systems, they are difficult to install operating systems, systems where commands prevail over the graphical interface and compatible only with specific hardware. Some examples are AIS, HP-UX, or Solaris.
Linux has operating systems for both servers and clients. Within the Linux world there are many distributions, lots of desks and lots of tools created for them. We have many examples, in terms of servers we have systems like Red Hat or SUSE Linux and in terms of desktop systems we have Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Debian.
Although the Linux kernel is based on Unix and they share some things, already we have seen how in the end they are different. Things like ownership of software and usefulness of systems make the difference between the two.