GNU (pronounced /ˈɡnuː/ ( listen)^[1]) is a Unix-like A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification computer operating system An operating system is the software on a computer that manages the way different programs use its hardware, and regulates the ways that a user controls the computer. Operating systems are found on almost any device that contains a computer with multiple programs—from cellular phones and video game consoles to supercomputers and web servers. Some developed by the GNU project 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, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"^[2] composed wholly of free software Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-. Development of GNU was initiated by Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman , often abbreviated "rms", is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software in 1983 and was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA (FSF), but no stable release of GNU yet exists as of July 2010.^[3][4][5] The latest alpha A software release is the distribution of software code, documentation, and other support materials, either by physical media, such as compact discs, or by download. The software release life cycle is composed of discrete phases along that describe the software's maturity as it advances from planning and development to release and support phases release of the GNU system is GNU 0.2, released in 2004, featuring GNU Hurd GNU Hurd is a free software Unix-like replacement for the Unix kernel, released under the GNU General Public License. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. It consists of a set of protocols and server processes (or daemons, in Unix terminology) that run on top of the GNU Mach microkernel; as the system's kernel In computing, the kernel is the central component of most computer operating systems; it is a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level. The kernel's responsibilities include managing the system's resources . Usually as a basic component of an operating system, a kernel can provide the lowest-level. Other (non-GNU) kernels can also presently be used with GNU; the FSF maintains that Linux Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems using the Linux kernel. Linux can be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from mobile phones, tablet computers and video game consoles, to mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers; in 2009 it held a server market share, when used with GNU tools and utilities, should be considered a variant of GNU GNU variants is a term used by the Free Software Foundation and others to refer to operating systems which use application software and system libraries from GNU, but use a kernel other than GNU Hurd, and promotes the term GNU/Linux for such systems (leading to the GNU/Linux naming controversy The GNU/Linux naming controversy is a dispute among members of the free and open source software community over how to refer to the computer operating system commonly called Linux).

GNU is a recursive acronym A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands. The term was first used in print in April 1986 for "GNU's Not Unix!", chosen because GNU's design is Unix-like A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit code.^[6] Programs released under the auspices of the GNU Project 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 are called GNU packages or GNU programs. The system's basic components include the GNU Compiler Collection The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain. As well as being the official compiler of the unfinished GNU operating system, GCC has been adopted as the standard compiler by most other modern Unix-like computer operating systems, (GCC), the GNU Binary Utilities The GNU Binary Utilities, or binutils, is a collection of programming tools for the manipulation of object code in various object file formats. The current versions were originally written by programmers at Cygnus Solutions using the Binary File Descriptor library . They are typically used in conjunction with GNU Compiler Collection, make, and GDB (binutils), the bash shell, the GNU C library The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the C standard library released by the GNU Project. Originally written by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU operating system, the library's development has been overseen by a committee since 2001, with Ulrich Drepper from Red Hat as the lead contributor and maintainer (glibc), and GNU Core Utilities The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, needed for Unix-like operating systems. It is a combination of a number of earlier packages, including textutils, shellutils, and fileutils, along with some other miscellaneous utilities (coreutils). GNU developers have contributed Linux ports In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed . The term is also used in a general way to refer to the changing of software/hardware to make them usable in different environments of GNU applications and utilities, which are now also widely used on other operating systems such as BSD Berkeley Software Distribution is the UNIX operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995 variants, Solaris Oracle Solaris is a UNIX-based operating system introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992 as the successor to SunOS and Mac OS X Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, Mac OS X has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems. It is the successor to Mac OS 9, the final release of the "classic" Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 198.

The GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project (GPL), the GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License. The GNU Library General Public License (as the LGPL was (LGPL), and the GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license (GFDL) were written for GNU, but are also used by many unrelated projects.

History

The plan for the GNU operating system was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to by Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman , often abbreviated "rms", is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software.^[7] Software development began on January 5, 1984, when Stallman quit his job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities[b] and is also a sea-grant and space- (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 Gnu" is a humorous song about a talking gnu by Flanders and Swann.^[8]

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 The GNU Manifesto was written by Richard Stallman and published in March 1985 in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools as an explanation and definition of the goals of the GNU Project, and to call for participation and support. It is held in high regard within the free software movement as a fundamental philosophical source. The full text is in March 1985.

Richard Stallman's experience with the Incompatible Timesharing System ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System , was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from MIT; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC (ITS), an early operating system written in assembly language Assembly languages are a type of low-level languages for programming computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other integrated circuits. They implement a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture. This representation is usually defined by the hardware that became obsolete due to discontinuation of PDP-10 The PDP-10 is a mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966. It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many, the computer architecture for which ITS was written, led to a decision that a portable In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed . The term is also used in a general way to refer to the changing of software/hardware to make them usable in different environments system was necessary.^[9] It was thus decided that GNU would be mostly compatible with Unix. At the time, Unix was already a popular proprietary The term proprietary software is often used to mean computer software which is neither free nor open source . Terminology for forms of software licensing is not fully standardized and can be controversial. A literal meaning of "proprietary" in relation to software is that it has a copyright owner who can exercise control over what users 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 The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA (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 Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide.

Design and implementation

The initial plan for GNU was to be mostly Unix-compatible, while adding enhancements where they were useful. By 1990, the GNU system had an extensible text editor Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code (Emacs Emacs is a class of feature-rich text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. Emacs has, perhaps, more editing commands than other editors, numbering over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work), a very successful optimizing compiler A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code). The most common reason for wanting to transform source code is to create an executable program (GCC The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain. As well as being the official compiler of the unfinished GNU operating system, GCC has been adopted as the standard compiler by most other modern Unix-like computer operating systems,), and most of the core libraries and utilities of a standard Unix distribution. As the goal was to make a whole free operating system exist—rather than necessarily to write a whole free operating system—Stallman tried to use existing free software when possible. In the 1980s there was not much free software, but there was the X Window System for graphical display, the TeX typesetting system, and the Mach Mach is an operating system microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. It is one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, and its derivatives are the basis of the modern operating system kernels in Mac OS X and GNU Hurd microkernel. These components were integrated into GNU .

In the GNU Manifesto, Stallman had mentioned that "an initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix." He was referring to TRIX TRIX is a research network-oriented operating system compatible with UNIX version 7. TRIX was developed in the late 1970s at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science by Professor Steve Ward and his research group. TRIX's kernel uses remote procedure calls (RPC). It was developed with the NuMachine,^{[citation needed]} a remote procedure call kernel developed at MIT Technology, whose authors had decided to distribute it as free software, and which was compatible with Version 7 Unix Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for Digital Equipment. In December 1986, work had started on modifying this kernel. However, the developers eventually decided it was unusable as a starting point, primarily because it only ran on "an obscure, expensive 68000 box" and would therefore have to be ported to other architectures before it could be used.

The GNU Project's early plan was to adapt the BSD 4.4-Lite Berkeley Software Distribution is the UNIX operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995 kernel for GNU. However, due to a lack of cooperation from the Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley , is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The university occupies 6,651 acres (2,692 ha) programmers,^{[citation needed]} by 1988 Stallman decided instead to use the Mach kernel Mach is an operating system microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. It is one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, and its derivatives are the basis of the modern operating system kernels in Mac OS X and GNU Hurd being developed at Carnegie Mellon University Coordinates: 40°26′36″N 79°56′37″W / 40.443322°N 79.943583°W Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university began as the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1900. In 1912, the school became Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year, although its release as free software was delayed until 1990 while its developers worked to remove code copyrighted to AT&T.^{[citation needed]} Thomas Bushnell, the initial Hurd architect, said in hindsight that the decision to start a new kernel rather than adapt the BSD work set the project back considerably, and that the project should have used the BSD kernel for this reason.^[10]

The design of the kernel was to be GNU's largest departure from "traditional" Unix. GNU's kernel was to be a set of programs called servers, forming a multi-server microkernel that would provide the same functionality as the traditional Unix kernel. Since the Mach microkernel, by design, provided just the low-level kernel functionality, the GNU Project had to develop the higher-level parts of the kernel, as a collection of user programs. Initially, this collection was to be called Alix, but developer Thomas Bushnell later preferred the name Hurd, so the Alix name was moved to a subsystem and eventually dropped completely.^[11] Eventually, development progress of the Hurd became very slow due to ongoing technical issues.^[12]

In 1992, when the Linux kernel became usable and was switched to a free software license, it became the most common host for GNU software. The GNU project coined the term GNU/Linux for such systems.

Despite an optimistic announcement by Stallman in 2002 predicting a release of GNU/Hurd,^[13] further development and design are still required. The latest release of the Hurd is version 0.2. It is fairly stable, suitable for use in non-critical applications.^{[citation needed]} As of 2005^[update], Hurd is in slow development, and is now the official kernel of the GNU system. There are also projects working on porting the GNU system to the kernels of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenSolaris.

Copyright, licenses, and stewardship

The GNU Project suggests contributors assign the copyright for GNU packages to the Free Software Foundation,^[14] although this is not required.^[15]

Copyright law grants the copyright-holder significant control over the copying and distributing of a work, but FSF wrote a license for the GNU software which grant recipients permission to copy and redistribute the software under highly permissive terms. For most of the 80s, each GNU package had its own licens: the Emacs General Public License, the GCC General Public License, et cetera. In 1989, FSF published a single license they could use for all their software, and which could be used by non-GNU projects: the GNU General Public License (GPL).

This license is now used by most GNU programs, as well as a large number of free software programs that are not part of the GNU project; it is the most commonly used free software license. It gives all recipients of a program the right to run, copy, modify and distribute it, while forbidding them from imposing further restrictions on any copies they distribute. This idea is often referred to as copyleft.

In 1991, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), then known as the Library General Public License, was written for certain libraries. 1991 also saw the release of version 2 of the GNU GPL. The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), for documentation, followed in 2000. The GPL and LGPL were revised to version 3 in 2007, improving their international applicability, and adding protection for users whose hardware restricts software changes.

Most GNU software is distributed under the GPL. A minority is distributed under the LGPL, and a handful of packages are distributed under permissive free software licences.^[16]

GNU software

Prominent components of the GNU system include the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU C Library (glibc), the GNU Emacs text editor, and the GNOME desktop environment.

Many GNU programs have been ported to a multitude of other operating systems, including various proprietary platforms such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. They are often installed on proprietary Unix systems as replacements for the proprietary utilities originally included. However, this practice is controversial: these GNU component programs were developed with the goal of replacing entire proprietary UNIX systems with free software, not enhancing these systems.

Many GNU programs have been tested against their proprietary Unix counterparts and shown as being more reliable.^[17]

As of 2007, there are a total of 319 GNU packages hosted on the official GNU development site.^[18]

GNU variants

Usage with the Linux kernel is by far the most popular distribution vector for GNU software, though the Linux kernel itself is not part of the GNU Project.

Other GNU variants which do not use the Hurd as a kernel include Nexenta OS (GNU plus the kernel of OpenSolaris) and GNU-Darwin. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Debian GNU/NetBSD from Debian bring the early plan of GNU on a BSD kernel full circle. GNU itself is distributed as Debian GNU/Hurd by the Debian project.

GNU logo

The logo for GNU is a gnu head. The well-known drawing was originally done by Etienne Suvasa. It appears in GNU software and in printed and electronic documentation for the GNU project, and is also used in Free Software Foundation materials.^[19]

See also

• Creative Commons
• Free software movement
• GNU Compiler for Java
• History of free software
• List of GNU packages
• List of Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation

References

1. ^ "What is GNU?". The GNU Operating System. Free Software Foundation. September 4, 2009. http://www.gnu.org/. Retrieved October 9, 2009. "The name "GNU" is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!"; it is pronounced g-noo, as one syllable with no vowel sound between the g and the n."
2. ^ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
3. ^ Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "Opinion: The top 10 operating system stinkers" in Computerworld, April 9, 2009: "But after more than 25 years in development, GNU remains incomplete: Its kernel, Hurd, has never really made it out of the starting blocks. ... Almost no one has actually been able to use the OS; it's really more a set of ideas than an operating system."
4. ^ >Hillesley, Richard. "GNU HURD: Altered visions and lost promise", June 30, 2010. See especially page 3: "Nearly twenty years later the HURD has still to reach maturity, and has never achieved production quality." ... "Some of us are still wishing and hoping for the real deal, a GNU operating system with a GNU kernel."
5. ^ Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, p. 54. Random House, Inc., 2001. ISBN 9780375505782. Referring to Stallman, Lessig wrote, "He had mixed all of the ingredients needed for an operating system to function, but he was missing the core."
6. ^ "The GNU Operating system". http://www.gnu.org/. Retrieved 2008-08-18.
7. ^ (27 September 1983). "new UNIX implementation". net.usoft. (Web link). Retrieved on 2008-08-18.
8. ^ "Stallman explaining why the name "GNU" was chosen". FSFE. http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#the-name-gnu. Retrieved 2007-02-20.
9. ^ "Stallman describing why a Unix-like design was chosen". FSFE. http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#choosing-the-unix-design. Retrieved 2007-02-20.
10. ^ Peter H. Salus. "The Hurd and BSDI". The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530. Retrieved 2008-08-18. "It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today."
11. ^ About the GNU Project - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
12. ^ "Stallman describing Hurd progress". http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#gnu-and-linux. "it took many many many years to get this kernel to run at all, and it still doesn't run well, and it looks like there may be fundamental problems with this design, which nobody knew about back in 1990."
13. ^ John Ribeiro (2002-03-11). "Free Software Sees Gnu Loose of Linux". PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/88464/free_software_sees_gnu_loose_of_linux.html. Retrieved 2006-08-08.
14. ^ Copyright Papers - Information For Maintainers of GNU Software
15. ^ Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors
16. ^ What the GPLv3 Means for MS-Novell Agreement
17. ^ Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities and Services - October 1995 - Computer Sciences Department,University of Wisconsin
18. ^ Statistics [Savannah]
19. ^ A GNU Head - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

External links

• Official website
• Ports of GNU utilities for Microsoft Windows
• The daemon, the GNU and the penguin
• GNU User Groups
• #gnu IRC channel

Categories: Computing acronyms | GNU Project | GNU Project software | Unix variants | Free software operating systems | Microkernel-based operating systems

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• GNU Hurd
• GNU: Encyclopedia
• Irc:: Irc.gnu.org: Hurd
• GNU Project Software
• GNUnet: Encyclopedia

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