25 years of GNU operating system

First, about opening a blog. The main purpose of its creation is to educate the community about Free Software and discuss the activities of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
Without waiting for comments, I will tell you right away. I know that there is an open source blog, but Free Software and Open Source are actually different things. Combining these concepts is one of the misconceptions with which this blog is designed to fight.
To the topic. In September 2008, the GNU operating system turns 25 years old.

You can read more about the history of its creation here . In other matters, one way or another, this story will be briefly described by me.
Due to the growing interest in Open Source in the world over the past few years, popularization in the Web and the media, today everyone knows about Open Source operating system, called “Linux”, and in our homeland sometimes just “Linux”. But not everyone knows that there is no “Linux” operating system. There is an operating system GNU / Linux . And the word GNU is the first in the name of this operating system not by chance.

Let us turn to history. It all started with the fact that on September 27, 1983, Richard Matthew Stallman (rms) published an announcement about the project in the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups. On January 5, 1984, he left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to devote his entire time to writing a free operating system and to ensure that the institute could not claim any rights to the GNU source code or prevent it from being distributed as Free Software.
The main purpose of creating GNU was the desire to create an absolutely free operating system that satisfies the four basic freedoms of its users: the freedom to explore the source code of the software used, the freedom to distribute this software, the freedom to make changes to its source code and the freedom to distribute its modified versions of this software .

GNU was created as a free counterpart to UNIX (the very name GNU is a recursive acronym for G NU is N ot U NIX). Accordingly, GNU was built on the same fundamental principles as UNIX. I started writing my operating system rms with user environment applications (the 1st GNU program was the Emacs text editor). All of these programs were compatible with the commercial versions of UNIX, and because of this, they became widely used, since they were in many ways superior to their proprietary counterparts. It also allowed the creation of a group of like-minded people and accelerated the process of developing a new system. In 1985, the Free Software Foundation was created; in 1988, the GNU General Public License, the purpose of which was to provide the user with the right to copy, modify and distribute (including on a commercial basis) programs, as well as to ensure that Users of all derivative programs will receive the rights listed above.
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By 1990, GNU was almost ready, the core component of the system was missing. The delay in the development of the kernel was due to the protracted opening of the Mach code under a free license, since the GNU kernel, later called Hurd, was planned to be developed on its basis.
In 1991, a historic and well-known event took place - Linus Torvalds wrote a UNIX-compatible kernel and called it Linux. Combining the Linux kernel and the incomplete GNU allowed us to create a free GNU / Linux operating system, which many of us are using now.

It should be understood that GNU / Linux is the version of the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel. Looking ahead, I note that GNU / Hurd continues to evolve, but for obvious reasons, its development is very slow and GNU / Linux doesn’t seem to catch up with it.

In 1998, along with the emergence of business interest in GNU / Linux, the term Open Source appeared, the main reason for which was confusion in the interpretation of the word “free”, sometimes perceived as “free” instead of “free”. From here - already become winged - Stallman's phrase “Free speech is not free beer”. The emergence of the term Open Source, in the opinion of many, was the starting point that gave rise to the popularization of GNU / Linux under the name "Linux" and the departure from the main goals of the creation of GNU.
There are many interesting publications on the GNU project site , including the reasoning about the GNU / Linux name. If there is time and enthusiasm, I will try to translate and publish.

In their speeches, rms encourages people to call the GNU / Linux operating system they use (“GNU slash Linux”) in order to mention the origins of its creation and the basic principles and ideas embedded in it, which, unfortunately, are far from being known to all its users. . Linus Torvalds, the creator of the GNU / Linux kernel, does not attach such importance to its name. At the same time, he once said that if, before 1991, GNU had a ready-made kernel, he would not have written his own.

The debate about the name continues. I don’t urge everyone to say “GNU / Linux” instead of “Linux” (after all, Stallman is for that) and, moreover, Torvalds’s opinion also has a place to live, because the name is just a name. But personally, I still prefer to follow the facts and call a spade a spade. No one knows what would have happened if there had been no GNU / Linux, if there had been two new UNIX-like systems. But it so happened that GNU / Linux appeared - the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel.

I hope, thanks to me, someone learned something new for themselves. If you are interested, I recommend watching Revolution OS movies ( here you can find Russian subtitles) and The Code . Both movies are on google video and on most file sharing networks.