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GNU - History

GNU - History: Encyclopedia II - GNU - History

The GNU project was announced publicly on September 27, 1983, on the news://net.unix-wizards [1] and news://net.usoft newsgroups. 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. The correct pronunciation of GNU is g'noo (IPA: /gnu/), with a hard "g", to distinguish it from the word new. According to Stallman, the name was inspired by various plays on wor ...

GNU: Encyclopedia II - GNU - History

GNU - History

The GNU project was announced publicly on September 27, 1983, on the news://net.unix-wizards [1] and news://net.usoft newsgroups. 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. The correct pronunciation of GNU is g'noo (IPA: /gnu/), with a hard "g", to distinguish it from the word new. According to Stallman, the name was inspired by various plays on words, including the song The Gnu.

The goal was to bring a wholly free software operating system into existence. Stallman wanted computer users to be free - as most were in the 60s and 70s - free to study the source code of the software they use, free to modify the behaviour of the software, and free to publish their modified versions of the software. This philosophy was published in March 1985 as The GNU Manifesto.

The majority of the software needed had to be written from scratch, but when compatible free software components already existed, they were used. Two examples were the TeX typesetting system, and the X Window System. Most of GNU has been written by volunteers; some in their spare time, some paid by other companies. In October 1985, Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In the mid- and late-80s, FSF hired software developers to write the software needed for GNU. At its peak it had 15 people on its staff. FSF also holds the copyrights for some GNU software packages. Most GNU packages are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), while a few use the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL), and a still smaller amount use other free software licenses.

So that it would be convenient for people to switch to GNU, it was decided that GNU would be mostly compatible with Unix, which was a popular proprietary operating system at the time. The design of Unix had proven to be solid, and it was modular, so it could be reimplemented piece by piece.

As GNU gained prominence, interested businesses began contributing to development or selling GNU software and technical support. The most prominent and successful of these was Cygnus Solutions, now part of Red Hat.