28 years ago, Linus Tordvalds announced on the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he had built a working prototype of the new Linux operating system. The system included a ported bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40, which allowed it to be considered self-sufficient.
Linux was created as an answer to MINIX, the license of which did not allow the community to conveniently exchange developments (at the same time, MINIX of those years was positioned as an educational one and was specially limited in its capabilities).
Linus originally planned to give his offspring the name Freax ("free", "freak" and X (Unix)), but Ari Lemmke, who offered Linus help in publishing, placing the OS archive on the server, named the directory with it "linux" .
The original license was "prohibitively non-commercial", but after listening to the opinion of the community that grew up around the project, Linus agreed to use GPLv2.
Source: linux.org.ru