View source for GNU Project

On September 27, 1983, [[Richard Stallman]] publicly announced on several email newsgroups his plan to build the GNU free software operating system. GNU is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym recursive acronym] that stands for "GNU's Not Unix". 

The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software ... to get along without any software that is not free." Software development began on January 5, 1984, when Stallman quit his job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology so that they could not claim ownership or interfere with distributing GNU as free software. 

In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. The same year, Stallman invented and popularized the concept of [[Copyleft]], which was first implemented in the GNU Emacs [[General Public License]] (GPL). 

The initial plan was for GNU to be Unix-compatible, while adding enhancements where they were useful. In order to make a whole free operating system, it was necessary to write from scratch much of the needed software, but Stallman tried to use existing free software when possible. There was not much of it the 1980s, but existing free software components such the X Window System for graphical display, the TeX typesetting system, and the Mach micro kernel were integrated into GNU. By 1990, the GNU system had an extensible text editor (Emacs), a very successful optimizing compiler (GCC), and most of the core libraries and utilities of a standard Unix distribution. 

The main missing element was a Unix-style kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd. But by producing software tools needed to write software, and by developing a general copyleft license, Stallman had helped make it easier for others to write free software. [[Linus Torvalds]], a Finnish student, used such tools to produce the Linux kernel in 1991. This could be combined with the GNU system to make a complete operating system. The goal of making a free software operating system was thus achieved in 1992 when [[Linux]] was released as free software. Most people use the name Linux to refer to the combination of the Linux kernel plus the GNU system, but Stallman insists that the system should be called "GNU/Linux", which he pronounces "GNU Slash Linux."

[[Category:FOSS Concepts]]