GNU Project: Difference between revisions

The '''GNU Project''' is a [[free software]], [[mass collaboration]] project, announced on September 27 1983, by [[Richard Stallman]] at MIT. 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'.' "

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 kernel|Linux]]" being released as Free Software, under a GNU [[GPL]] v2 license.

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]].

The first goal of the GNU project was to create a whole free-software operating system. By 1992, the GNU project had completed all of the major operating system components except for their kernel, [[GNU Hurd]]. The [[Linux kernel]], started independently by [[Linus Torvalds]] in 1991 filled the last gap, and Linux version 0.12 was released under the [[GPL]] in 1992. Together, Linux and GNU formed the first completely free-software operating system. Though the Linux kernel is not part of the GNU project, it was developed using [[GNU Compiler Collection|GCC]] and other gnu programming tools.

From the mid-1990s onward, with many companies investing in free software development, the [[Free Software Foundation]] redirected its funds toward the legal and political support of free software development. Software development from that point on focused on maintaining existing projects, and starting new projects only when there was an acute threat to the [[free software community]]; see [[High Priority Free Software Projects]].

Another example is [[Gnash]]. Gnash is software to play content distributed in the [[Adobe Flash]] format. This has been marked as a priority project by GNU because it was seen that many people were installing a free software operating system and using a free software web-browser, but were then also installing the proprietary software plug-in from Adobe.