The GNU program, also known as the slave program, was publicly launched by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to create a set of completely free operating systems.
In order to ensure that GNU software is free to "use, reproduce, modify and distribute", all GNU software has an agreement to grant all rights to anyone without the addition of any restrictions to any other person, the GNU General Public License (GNU LICENSE,GPL). The concept of "anti-copyright" (or copyleft).
In 1985, Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (Software Foundation) to provide technical, legal and financial support for the GNU program. By the year 1990, the GNU program has developed software that includes a powerful text editor Emacs. GCC (GNU Compiler Collection,gnu Compiler Collection) is a set of programming language compilers developed by GNU. As well as libraries and tools for most UNIX systems. The only important component that remains unfinished is the kernel of the operating system (known as Hurd).
1992 Linux with other GNU software combined, a completely free operating system was formally born. The operating system is often referred to as "Gnu/linux" or simply Linux.
What is GNU?