Brian Jhan Fox | |
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![]() Fox in 2008 | |
Born | Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. | December 11, 1959
Occupations |
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Employer(s) | Opus Logica, Inc. |
Known for | GNU Bash |
Relatives | Donal Fox (brother) |
Brian Jhan Fox (born 1959) is an American computer programmer and free software advocate. He is the original author of the GNU Bash shell, which he announced as a beta in June 1989. [1] He continued as the primary maintainer of bash until at least early 1993. [2] [3] Fox also built the first interactive online banking software in the U.S. for Wells Fargo in 1995, [4] and he created an open source election system in 2008.
In 1985, Fox worked with Richard Stallman at Stallman's newly created Free Software Foundation. [5] At the FSF, Fox authored GNU Bash, [6] GNU Makeinfo, GNU Info, GNU Finger, GNU Echo [7] and the readline [8] and history libraries.
He was also the maintainer of GNU Emacs for a time, making many contributions to the software which was created and maintained for the GNU Project between 1986 and 1994. [4]
In 2008, Fox collaborated with Alan Dechert and Brent Turner to create a completely open source election system. The system was coded together with Parker Abercrombie, and demonstrated at the LinuxWorld conference in Moscone Center in San Francisco, August 5–7, 2008. [9]
Fox also is a founding member of both the California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO) [10] and the National Association of Voting Officials (NAVO). [11] These not-for-profit organizations promote open source voting systems for use in public elections. Fox co-wrote a New York Times piece in 2015 with former CIA head R. James Woolsey advocating open source election systems as a means of securing US elections against interference from foreign actors. [12]
Fox also wrote AMACS, a cut-down implementation of Emacs for the Apple II series. [13]
He is the fourth born in a family of six siblings, composer and musician Donal Fox, Thaddeus Fox, sister Ena Fox, Daniel Fox and sister Sara Fox-Ray. He is the son of physicist and educator Herbert Fox [14] and grandson of artist Daniel Fox, creator of the Monopoly Man. [15]
Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. The shell's name is an acronym for Bourne-Again SHell, a pun on the name of the Bourne shell that it replaces and the notion of being "born again". First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions and it was one of the first programs Linus Torvalds ported to Linux, alongside GCC. It is available on nearly all modern operating systems.
The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.
Free software, libre software, or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
The GNU Manifesto is a call-to-action by Richard Stallman encouraging participation and support of the GNU Project's goal in developing the GNU free computer operating system. The GNU Manifesto was published in March 1985 in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools. It is held in high regard within the free software movement as a fundamental philosophical source.
In the Unix operating system, shar is an archive format created with the Unix shar
utility. A shar file is a type of self-extracting archive, because it is a valid shell script, and executing it will recreate the files. To extract the files, only the standard Unix Bourne shell sh is usually required.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
Texinfo is a typesetting syntax used for generating documentation in both on-line and printed form with a single source file. It is implemented by a computer program released as free software of the same name, created and made available by the GNU Project from the Free Software Foundation.
Within the free software and the open-source software communities there is controversy over whether to refer to computer operating systems that use a combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel as "GNU/Linux" or "Linux" systems.
GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions is the preferred extension language system for the GNU Project and features an implementation of the programming language Scheme. Its first version was released in 1993. In addition to large parts of Scheme standards, Guile Scheme includes modularized extensions for many different programming tasks.
GNU Readline is a software library that provides in-line editing and history capabilities for interactive programs with a command-line interface, such as Bash. It is currently maintained by Chet Ramey as part of the GNU Project.
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a written debate between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding the Linux kernel and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.minix, arguing that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels and therefore Linux was, even in 1992, obsolete. The debate has sometimes been considered a flame war.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.
Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. is a free software activist and one of the founding board members of the Free Software Foundation, where he contributed to the initial releases of gcc and GNU diff. He left the Free Software Foundation in 1997.
Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. 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 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.
GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor."
Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.2, released January 2024.