In the early 80s Richard Stallman working in the AI lab in MIT started the GNU Project with the goal of creating an entire free and open source UNIX like Operating system, this all started when lab got a new printer but license is restricted his ability to modify the code.
He had hacked earlier printer's to electronically send messages to user's who printed items when the printing was completed as well as notifying other users when the printer was free to use.
By the 90s there is almost enough GNU Software to create an entire Operating system, however their kernel the GNU's heart was not yet completed.
Meanwhile in the early 90s Linus Torvalds set up a hobby project to develop a Unix like kernel known as Linux and used GNU Software such as GNU's Compiler to do it,While the kernels on his own was useless he ended up including GNU Software with the kernel to release an operating system.
Later Richard Stallman's free software foundation sponsored the group Debian to release GNU/Linux distribution, that was completely open for people to use and contribute to Debian.
Over the years that a small group of free software foundation spread all over the world and created enormous community that is now developing linux.
Due to its popularity Debian is become the base of countless Linux distribution's, and because of this we have many distributions which is kind of mess.
That's why many common user's often asks for what distribution should I use as a beginner?
Well there are few bistros out there that actually includes its own software, one of the biggest problems in Linux that how many bistros their are and the fact that a lot of them are same distribution's with new wallpapers, name's, and icon's but inside everything else is the same.
Ubuntu was started in the early 2000 and it's owned and distributed by colonial the base of Ubuntu is Debian and Ubuntu has become so popular because of the developers who gave their countless time to make it better.
Working as a process which the operating system is used is the base of a new distribution. Ubuntu includes its own desktop environment called unity and is recently started distributing phone's running on Ubuntu.
Colonial also contributes in bug fixes and other contribution up streams meaning that they send this changes back to Debian to include in future releases. While Debian releases new versions sporadically Ubuntu is aimless to capture the stability of Debian but releases new versions more frequently.
As such canonical releases two distribution per year one in April and one in October the naming convention of an Ubuntu is year and month.
ex: Ubuntu 14.04 this bistro is released in April 2014.
Every two years in April a long term Support for version is released called LTS. Which is officially Supported for 5 years while releases in between LTS Versions are supported for only 9 months.
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