GNU

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The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman. It initiated the GNU operating system, software development for which began in January 1984. 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."[1]

To make this happen, the GNU Project began working on an operating system called GNU. GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for "GNU's Not Unix". This goal of making a free software operating system was achieved in 1992 when the last gap in the GNU system, a kernel, was filled by a third-party Unix-style kernel called "Linux" being released as Free Software, under a GNU GPL v2 license.

Current work of the GNU Project includes software development, awareness building, and political campaigning. Although most of the GNU Project's output is technical in nature, it was launched as a social, ethical, and political initiative. As well as producing software and licenses, the GNU Project has published a large number of philosophical writings, the majority of which were authored by Richard Stallman.

Subprojects

One of the most notable and widely used software projects are:

  • Gnome - fully featured desktop environment used in most Linux distributions.
  • Gnash - a free software player and browser plugin for the Adobe Flash file format.
  • GCC - GNU compiler collection, one of the most widely used compilers in the world.
  • GIMP - GNU image manipulation program, in other words an advanced multi-layer raster image editor.

For a full list visit this site o the FSF Free Software Directory.

Organizational structure

The GNU project can be viewed as an umbrella project which coordinates efforts between its subproject and incubates new ones to achieve its stated goal which is createing and improving the fully free and open source operationg system.