GNU
Screenshot of GNOME, GNU Emacs and the GIMP, all parts of GNU
Website	http://www.gnu.org/
Company/ developer	GNU Project
OS family	Unix-like
Source model	Free software
Latest stable release	0. A gnome is a Mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle Emacs is a class of feature-rich Text editors usually characterized by their extensibility The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a free Raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs A website (alternatively web site or Web site, a back-construction from the Proper noun World Wide Web) is a collection of Web pages The software industry comprises businesses involved in the development, maintenance and publication of Computer software. A software developer is a person or organization concerned with facets of the software development process wider than design and coding a somewhat broader scope of The GNU Project is a Free software, Mass collaboration project announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. A Unix-like (sometimes shortened to *nix) Operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system while not necessarily conforming Free software or software libre is Software that can be used studied and modified without restriction and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified 2 / 1997[1]
Kernel type	Microkernel
License	GNU General Public License and other free software licenses
Working state	current

GNU (pronounced /gnuː/ (help·info)) is a set of tools for a Unix-like OS composed entirely of free software. Year 1997 ( MCMXCVII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1997 Gregorian calendar In Computer science, the kernel is the central component of most computer Operating systems (OS A microkernel is a minimal Computer Operating system kernel which in its purest form provides no operating-system services at all only the A software license (or software licence in commonwealth usage is a Legal instrument governing the usage or redistribution of copyright protected software A free software licence is a Software licence which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the Software which would otherwise be prohibited by Copyright Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Free software or software libre is Software that can be used studied and modified without restriction and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified Its name is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix; it was chosen because its design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and by not containing any Unix code. A recursive acronym (or occasionally recursive initialism, and sometimes recursive backronym) is an Abbreviation that refers to itself in the A Unix-like (sometimes shortened to *nix) Operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system while not necessarily conforming Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer ^[2] Development of GNU was initiated by Richard Stallman and was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16 1953 often abbreviated " rms " is an American software freedom activist The Free Software Foundation ( FSF) is a Non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the Free software movement

The project to develop GNU is known as the GNU Project, and programs released under the auspices of the GNU Project are called GNU packages or GNU programs. The GNU Project is a Free software, Mass collaboration project announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The system's basic components include the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU Binary Utilities (binutils), the bash shell, the GNU C library (glibc), and GNU Core Utilities (coreutils). The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of Compilers produced for various Programming languages by the GNU Project The GNU Binary Utilities, or binutils, is a collection of Programming tools for the manipulation of Object code in various Object file Bash is a Free software Unix shell written for the GNU Project. The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the C standard library released by the GNU Project. The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU Software containing many of the basic tools such as cat, Ls

GNU is in active development. Although most components have been completed long ago and have been in production use for a decade or more, its official kernel, GNU Hurd, is incomplete and not all GNU components work with it. In Computer science, the kernel is the central component of most computer Operating systems (OS For this reason, most GNU users, and users of GNU programs use the third-party Linux kernel. Linux is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like Operating systems These are popularly termed Linux operating systems and While Linux has not been officially adopted as the kernel of GNU, GNU does officially include other third party software such as the X.Org release of the X Window System and the TeX typesetting system. TeX (ˈtɛx as in Greek, often /ˈtɛk/ in English; written with a lowercase 'e' in imitation of the logo is a Typesetting system designed and mostly Many GNU programs have also been ported to numerous other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, BSD variants, Solaris and Mac OS. Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Solaris is a Unix -based Operating system introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992 as the successor to SunOS. Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of Graphical user interface -based Operating systems developed by Apple Inc

The GNU General Public License (GPL), the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) were written for GNU, but are also used by many unrelated projects. The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) or LGPL is a Free software license published by the Free Software The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software

History

The plan for the GNU operating system was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net. Events 489 - Odoacer attacks Theodoric at the Battle of Verona and is defeated again Year 1983 ( MCMLXXXIII) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays the 1983 Gregorian calendar) unix-wizards and net. usoft newsgroups by Richard Stallman. A newsgroup is a Repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from many users in different locations Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16 1953 often abbreviated " rms " is an American software freedom activist ^[3] 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. Events 1477 - Battle of Nancy: Charles the Bold is killed and Burgundy becomes part of France. Year 1984 ( MCMLXXXIV) was a Leap year starting on Sunday (link displays the 1984 Gregorian calendar) According to Stallman, the name was inspired by various plays on words, including the song The Gnu. "The Gnu" (sometimes known as "I'm a Gnu" or "The Gnu Song" is a humorous Song about a talking gnu by Flanders and Swann. ^[4]

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 1960s and 1970s: free to study the source code of the software they use, free to share the software with other people, free to modify the behaviour of the software, and free to publish their modified versions of the software. This philosophy was later published as the GNU Manifesto in March 1985. The GNU Manifesto was written by Richard Stallman and published in March 1985 in Dr

Richard Stallman's experience with the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), an early operating system written in assembly language that became obsolete due to discontinuation of PDP-10, the computer architecture that ITS was written for, led to a decision that a portable system was necessary. ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System (named in comparison with the Compatible Time-Sharing System also in use at MIT was an early revolutionary and influential See the terminology section below for information regarding inconsistent use of the terms assembly and assembler The PDP-10 was a Mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC from the late 1960s on the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor See also Software portability In Computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created ^[5] It was thus decided that GNU would be mostly compatible with Unix. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer At the time, Unix was (and is) a popular proprietary operating system. Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing. The design of Unix had proven to be solid, and it was modular, so it could be reimplemented piece by piece.

Much of the needed software had to be written from scratch, but existing compatible free software components were used. Two examples were the TeX typesetting system, and the X Window System. TeX (ˈtɛx as in Greek, often /ˈtɛk/ in English; written with a lowercase 'e' in imitation of the logo is a Typesetting system designed and mostly Most of GNU has been written by volunteers; some in their spare time, some paid by companies, educational institutions, and other non-profit organizations. In October 1985, Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The Free Software Foundation ( FSF) is a Non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the Free software movement In the late 1980s and 1990s, the FSF hired software developers to write the software needed for GNU.

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. Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide In Computing, Red Hat Inc ( is a company dedicated to Free and open source software, and a major Linux distribution vendor

Design and implementation

The initial plan for GNU was to be mostly Unix-compatible, while adding enhancements where they were useful. 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. A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain Text files Text editors are often provided with Operating systems or software development Emacs is a class of feature-rich Text editors usually characterized by their extensibility A compiler is a Computer program (or set of programs that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of Compilers produced for various Programming languages by the GNU Project As the goal was to make a whole free operating system exist - rather than necessarily to write a whole free operating system - Stallman tried to use existing free software when possible. In the 1980s there was not much free software, but there was the X Window System for graphical display, the TeX typesetting system, and the Mach microkernel. TeX (ˈtɛx as in Greek, often /ˈtɛk/ in English; written with a lowercase 'e' in imitation of the logo is a Typesetting system designed and mostly Mach is an Operating system Microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research primarily distributed and parallel These components were integrated into GNU.

In the GNU Manifesto, Stallman had mentioned that "an initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix. " He was referring to TRIX, a remote procedure call kernel developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose authors had decided to distribute it as free software, and was compatible with Version 7 Unix. TRIX is a research network-oriented operating system compatible with UNIX version 7. Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix Operating system In December 1986, work had started on modifying this kernel. However, the developers eventually decided it was unusable as a starting point, primarily because it only ran on "an obscure, expensive 68000 box" and would therefore have to be ported to other architectures before it could be used. See also Software portability In Computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created

The GNU Project's early plan was to adapt the BSD 4. 4-Lite kernel for GNU. However, due to a lack of cooperation from the Berkeley programmers, by 1988 Stallman decided instead to use the Mach kernel being developed at Carnegie Mellon University, although its release as free software was delayed until 1990 while its developers worked to remove code copyrighted to AT&T. The University of California Berkeley (also referred to as Cal, Berkeley and UC Berkeley) is a major research university located in Berkeley Mach is an Operating system Microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research primarily distributed and parallel Carnegie Mellon University (also known as CMU) is a private Research University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United Before proposing a merge request please see Talk and see if the merger you propose has recently been made and Thomas Bushnell, the initial Hurd architect, said in hindsight that the decision to start a new kernel rather than adapt the BSD work set the project back considerably, and that the project should have used the BSD kernel for this reason. ^[6]

The design of the kernel was to be GNU's largest departure from "traditional" Unix. GNU's kernel was to be a multi-server microkernel, and was to consist of a set of programs called servers that offers the same functionality as the traditional Unix kernel. A microkernel is a minimal Computer Operating system kernel which in its purest form provides no operating-system services at all only the Since the Mach microkernel, by design, provided just the low-level kernel functionality, the GNU Project had to develop the higher-level parts of the kernel, as a collection of user programs. Initially, this collection was to be called Alix, but developer Thomas Bushnell later preferred the name Hurd, so the Alix name was moved to a subsystem and eventually dropped completely. Thomas Bushnell BSG, formerly known as Michael Bushnell, is a software developer and Gregorian friar. ^[7] Eventually, development progress of the Hurd became very slow due to ongoing technical issues. ^[8]

Despite an optimistic announcement by Stallman in 2002 predicting a release of GNU/Hurd,^[9] further development and design are still required. The latest release of the Hurd is version 0. 2. It is fairly stable, suitable for use in non-critical applications. As of 2005, Hurd is in slow development, and is now the official kernel of the GNU system. Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. There is also a project working on porting the GNU system to the kernels of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenSolaris. FreeBSD is a Unix-like free Operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD branch through NetBSD is a freely redistributable Open source version of the Unix -derivative Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD Computer Operating OpenSolaris is an Open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology

After the Linux kernel became usable, Linux became the most common host for GNU software. Linux is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like Operating systems These are popularly termed Linux operating systems and Linux (commonly pronounced ˈlɪnəks The GNU project coined the term GNU/Linux for such systems.

See also: GNU/Linux naming controversy

Copyright, licenses, and stewardship

The GNU Project suggests contributors assign the copyright for GNU packages to the Free Software Foundation ^[10] although this is not required. The GNU/Linux naming controversy is a dispute among members of the Free and open source software community. ^[11]

Ordinarily, copyright law prohibits people from copying and distributing a work, but FSF wrote a license for the GNU software which grant recipients permission to copy and redistribute the software. For most of the 80s, each GNU package had its own license - the Emacs General Public License, the GCC General Public License, etc. In 1989, FSF published a single license they could use for all their software, and which could be used by non-GNU projects: the GNU General Public License (GPL).

This license is now used by most GNU programs, as well as a large number of free software programs that are not part of the GNU project; it is the most commonly used free software license. A free software licence is a Software licence which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the Software which would otherwise be prohibited by Copyright It gives all recipients of a program the right to run, copy, modify and distribute it, while forbidding them from imposing further restrictions on any copies they distribute. This idea is often referred to as copyleft. Copyleft is a play on the word Copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions

In 1991, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) was written for certain libraries. The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) or LGPL is a Free software license published by the Free Software 1991 also saw the release of version 2 of the GNU GPL. The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), for documentation, followed in 2000. The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software The GPL and LGPL were revised to version 3 in 2007, improving their international applicability, and adding protection for users whose hardware restricts software changes.

Most GNU software is distributed under the GPL. A minority is distributed under the LGPL, and a handful of packages are distributed under permissive free software licences. ^[12]

GNU software

Main article: List of GNU packages

Prominent components of the GNU system include the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU C Library (glibc), the GNU Emacs text editor, and the GNOME desktop environment. This list of GNU packages lists notable software packages developed for or maintained by the Free Software Foundation for GNU, a Unix-like computer The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of Compilers produced for various Programming languages by the GNU Project The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the C standard library released by the GNU Project. Emacs is a class of feature-rich Text editors usually characterized by their extensibility A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain Text files Text editors are often provided with Operating systems or software development A gnome is a Mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle In graphical computing a desktop environment ( DE) commonly refers to a style of Graphical user interface (GUI that is based on the Desktop metaphor which

Many GNU programs have been ported to a multitude of other operating systems, including various proprietary platforms such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing. Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Mac OS X (mæk oʊ ɛs tɛn is a line of computer Operating systems developed marketed and sold by Apple Inc, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently They are often installed on proprietary UNIX systems as a replacement for proprietary utilities, however, this is often a hot topic among enthusiasts, as the motive for developing these programs was to replace those systems with free software, not to enhance them. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer These GNU programs have in contested cases been tested to show as being more reliable than their proprietary Unix counterparts. ^[13]

As of 2007, there are a total of 319 GNU packages hosted on the official GNU development site. ^[14]

Distributions of GNU

Usage with the Linux kernel is by far the most popular distribution vector for GNU software, though the Linux kernel is not itself part of GNU. Linux is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like Operating systems These are popularly termed Linux operating systems and Linux is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like Operating systems These are popularly termed Linux operating systems and

Other GNU variants which do not use the Hurd as a kernel include Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Debian GNU/NetBSD from Debian, Nexenta OS (GNU plus the kernel of OpenSolaris) and GNU-Darwin. GNU variants is a term used by the Free Software Foundation and others to refer to Operating systems which use Application software and system libraries Nexenta OS is a computer Operating system based on Debian / Ubuntu and Solaris for IA-32 and X86-64 based systems OpenSolaris is an Open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology GNU-Darwin is a project to package applications for the Mac OS X and Darwin Operating systems They also distribute versions of the Darwin operating GNU itself is distributed as Debian GNU/Hurd by the Debian project, and a Live CD is also available from Superunprivileged.org. Debian GNU/Hurd is the Debian Project's distribution of the GNU Operating system (with the GNU Hurd as its kernel) A live CD or live distro is a computer Operating system that is executed upon boot, without installation to a Hard disk drive.

GNU Logo

The logo for GNU is a gnu head. The well-known drawing was originally done by Etienne Suvasa. It appears in GNU software and in printed and electronic documentation for the GNU project, and is also used in Free Software Foundation materials. [1]

See also

• Open Source history
• Free software movement
• GNU Free Documentation License
• GNU Project
• List of GNU packages

References

External links

• Official website
• Ports of GNU utilities for Microsoft Windows
• The daemon, the GNU and the penguin
• GNU User Groups
• #gnu IRC channel