GNU Project

GNU Project . Started by Richard Stallman with the goal of creating a completely free software operating system . On September 27 , 1983, the project was first announced to the world in the net.unix-wizards newsgroup. The original announcement was followed by other Essays written by Richard Stallman such as the GNU Manifesto , which established his motivations for carrying out the GNU project, including “returning to the spirit of cooperation that prevailed in the early days of the computer user community.” .

Summary

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• 1 Etymology
• 2 History
• 3 Programs developed by the GNU project
• 4 The GNU project and the development of other packages
• 5 GNU Distributions
• 6 External links
• 7 See also

Etymology

GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for GNU is Not Unix . Since in English ” gnu ” is pronounced the same as ” new “, Richard Stallman recommends pronouncing it ” guh-noo “. In Spanish, it is recommended to pronounce wildebeest like the African antelope or phonetically; The GNU operating system – Free, not free. What is the GNU project? Therefore, the term is mostly spelled (GNU) for better understanding.

In his talks Richard Stallman finally always says “It can be pronounced in any way, the only mispronunciation is to say Linux

History

UNIX is a very popular non-free software operating system, because it is based on an architecture that has proven to be technically stable. The GNU system was designed to be fully compatible with UNIX. Being compatible with the UNIX architecture means that GNU is made up of small individual pieces of software, many of which were already available, such as the TeX text editing system and the X Window graphics system, which could be adapted and reused; others, however, had to be rewritten.

To ensure that the GNU software remained free for all users to “run, copy, modify, and distribute,” the project had to be released under a license designed to guarantee those rights while avoiding further restrictions on them. The idea is known in English as Copyleft -allowed copying- (in clear opposition to Copyright -copy right-, and is contained in the GNU General Public License ( GPL ).

In 1985 , Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to provide logistical, legal and financial support to the GNU project. The FSF also hired programmers to contribute to GNU, although a large portion of the development was (and continues to be) done by volunteers. As GNU gained popularity, interested businesses began to contribute to the development or marketing of GNU products and corresponding technical support. The most prominent and successful of these was Cygnus Solutions, now part of Red Hat.

By 1990, the GNU system already had a text editor called Emacs , a successful Compiler (GCC), and most of the libraries and utilities that make up a typical UNIX operating system . But a key component called the kernel was missing.

In the GNU manifesto, Stallman mentioned that “an initial kernel exists, but many other programs are needed to emulate Unix.” He was referring to TRIX , which is a remote procedure calling kernel, developed by MIT and whose authors decided to make it freely distributed; TRIX was fully compatible with UNIX version 7.

In December 1986, work had already been done to modify this core. However, the programmers decided that it was not initially usable, because it only worked on “some extremely complicated and expensive computers” which is why it would have to be ported to other architectures before it could be used.

Finally, in 1988 , it was decided to use the Mach core developed at CMU as a base . Initially, the core was named Alix (the name of Stallman’s girlfriend), but by decision of programmer Michael Bushnell it was renamed Hurd. Unfortunately, due to technical reasons and personal conflicts between the original programmers, the development of Hurd ended up stalling.

In 1991 , Linus Torvalds began writing the Linux kernel and decided to distribute it under the GPL license . Quickly, multiple programmers joined Linus in development, collaborating over the Internet and gradually making Linux a UNIX-compatible kernel.

In 1992 , the Linux kernel was combined with the GNU system, resulting in a free and fully functional operating system. The Operating System formed by this combination is usually known as ” GNU/Linux ” or as a “Linux Distribution” and there are several variants. (See also: Controversy over the GNU/Linux name)

It is also common to find GNU components installed on a non-free UNIX system, instead of the original UNIX programs. This is because many of the programs written by the GNU project have proven to be of higher quality than their UNIX equivalent versions. These components are often referred to collectively as “GNU tools.” Many of the GNU programs have also been ported to other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and ” True ”

Programs developed by the GNU project

List of some programs developed by the GNU project:

• Bison– parser generator designed to replace Yacc .
• Bash– Command Interpreter.
• BFD– library files.
• Binutils– GNU Assembler, GNU Linker, and related tools.
• Classpath– libraries for Java.
• DotGNU– .NET substitute
• Emacs– Extensible, self-documenting text editor.
• GCC– Compiler optimized for several languages, particularly <a href=”C programming language”>C</a>
• GDB– Application Debugger.
• GNU Ghostscript– Applications for PostScript and PDF.
• GIMP– photo editing program.
• Glibc– library for C language .
• GMP– library for calculations with Arbitrary Precision.
• GNOME– graphical desktop environment.
• Build system for GNU.
• GNUnet– decentralized personal communications network, designed to resist unauthorized interference.
• GNUstep– implementation of the OpenStep library set, as well as tools for programming graphical applications.
• GSL– Scientific Library for GNU.
• Gzip– Applications and libraries for Data Compression.
• Hurd– a Microkernel and a set of servers that work in the same way as the UNIX kernel.
• Maxima– a System for algebraic calculations.
• Octave– a program for numerical computing similar to MATLAB.
• GNU MDK– a set of tools for programming in MIX.
• Texinfo– documentation system.
• LilyPond– music sheet editor.

The GNU project and the development of other packages

• CVS– version control system for source code.
• DDD– graphical tools for error detection and debugging.

GNU Distributions

The only completely GNU variant is GNU with the GNU Hurd kernel , this is distributed as Debian GNU/Hurd and others, although there is no official version as of yet.

Linux is the kernel most used with GNU, although Linux itself is not part of GNU. GNU is also used with other kernels. For example, in Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, Debian GNU/NetBSD , Nexenta OS or GNU-Darwin.