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History
The plan for the GNU operating system was
publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards
and net.usoft newsgroups by Richard Stallman. Software development
began on January 5, 1984, when Stallman quit his job at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory so that they could not claim ownership or interfere with
distributing GNU as free software. Richard Stallman chose the name
by using 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 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.
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 for which ITS was written, led to a decision that a
portable system was necessary. It was thus decided that GNU would be
mostly compatible with Unix. At the time, Unix was already a popular
proprietary operating system. 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 also used such as
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
companies, educational institutions, and other non-profit
organizations. In October 1985, Stallman set up the Free Software
Foundation (FSF). 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.
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