GNU
More info
- Creator
- Richard Stallman
- Released
- 1983
- Type
- Operating system project
- Website
- gnu.org
The project that set out to build a free Unix-like system — and succeeded at everything except the kernel.
Richard Stallman announced GNU in September 1983, the name a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Over the following decade the tools appeared: GCC, Emacs, Bash, coreutils, glibc. The GNU Hurd kernel was started in 1990 and never became production-ready.
In 1991 Linus Torvalds wrote a kernel that filled the gap, and the combination became what most people call Linux. The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, insists on the name GNU/Linux — one of the industry's more durable naming disputes. The GPL came out of the same work.