Pos/420 Week 2 Dq1

POS/420 Week 2 DQ1

What is the relationship between Linux® and UNIX®? How has their relationship evolved over time? What similarities and differences are seen between them?

Answer:

My view of the differences between UNIX and Linux are in the user environment. Unix distributions are focused towards  and enterprise environment and maintains a “headless” (has no graphic user interface, GUI) model to reduce the “cracking” footprint and Linux is focused towards a workstation for a user luring them from a MS Windows operating system platform with a larger ”foot-print” that may be “cracked” more easily. I also believe that the terms “Hacking” and “Cracking” are not used correctly towards programmers today.

I believe that “Hacking” is a term of endearment for a programmer that reaps a greater community benefit from modifying code, “cracking” is the darker more criminal activity that is illegal because it causes damage to operating systems. As an example:  A “Cracker” would be a programmer that creates programs that exploit Operating Systems programs such as computer viruses. The use of the term "cracker" I have used has no reference to any ethnic group slang term.

 The larger GUI foot-print exposes more code for the “cracker” to exploit, which is what I think is the reason enterprise prefer to maintain “headless” operating systems.

I believe that the Unix and Linux systems are very similar because they originate from the same theoretical code base. They branch apart to serve their respective customer base (audiences’), as example HP-UX for enterprises and Suse or MAC for graphic user workstations.