Linus Torvalds of the past "unprofessional and uncalled for" and announced a period of "time off" to "get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately". It soon transpired that these events followed "The New Yorker" approaching Linus with a series of questions critical of his conduct. Following the release of Linux 4.19 on October 22, Linus went back to maintaining the kernel. Initially, Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed "Freax" (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP
Linux free software. Work began in 1984. Later, in 1985, Stallman started the Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) in 1989. By the early 1990s, many of the programs required in an operating system (such as libraries, compilers, text editors, a Unix shell, and a windowing system) were completed, although low-level elements such as device drivers, daemons, and the kernel, called GNU/Hurd, were stalled and incomplete. Linus Torvalds has stated that if the GNU kernel had been available at the time (1991), he would not have decided to write his own. Although not released until