History of free and open-source software like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted attention from volunteer programmers. Until this point, the GNU project's lack of a kernel meant that no complete free software operating systems existed. The development of Torvalds' kernel closed that last gap. The combination of the almost-finished GNU operating system and the Linux kernel made the first complete free software operating system. Among Linux distributions, Debian GNU/Linux, begun by Ian Murdock in 1993, is noteworthy for being explicitly committed to the GNU and FSF principles of free software. The Debian developers' principles are expressed in the Debian Social Contract. Since its inception, the Debian project
Sprite (operating system) 1994. Sprite (operating system) Sprite is an experimental Unix-like distributed operating system developed at the University of California, Berkeley by John Ousterhout's research group between 1984 and 1992. Its notable features include support for single system image on computer clusters and the introduction of the log-structured filesystem. The Tcl scripting language also originated in this project. Early work on Sprite was based on the idea of making the operating system more "network aware", and thereby at the same time make it invisible to the user. The primary area of work was the building of a new network file system which