On September 27, 1983, Stallman announced the start of work on GNU

On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman sent an announcement to the newsgroups net.unix-wizards and net.usoft about the start of work on GNU, a free operating system compatible with Unix. The message was posted under the title "new UNIX implementation". This marks the beginning of the project whose name reads recursively: "GNU's Not Unix!"

The name reflects the essence of the design. GNU reproduces the structure of Unix but differs from it in two important respects: it is free software, and it contains no Unix code. The goal was to create a fully free operating system; Stallman himself called GNU a technical means to a social end. By his design, users were to be free to study the source code of programs, to share them, to change their behaviour, and to publish their own modified versions.

From Announcement to Work on the Code

Stallman began working on the code on January 5, 1984. To do so he left the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: that way his employer could not claim rights to the GNU components or hinder their distribution as free software.

The system was to be made portable, so C and Lisp were chosen as the systems programming languages, and GNU was to remain compatible with Unix. At the time Unix was already a popular proprietary system, but its modular design made it possible to rewrite it piece by piece. Much had to be created from scratch, while some third-party free components, such as the TeX typesetting system and the X Window System, were used ready-made.

The framework of a single project turned out to be too narrow: it was within GNU that the idea of free software as a social movement emerged. In March 1985 the GNU Manifesto was published, setting out this philosophy, and in October 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation, which in the late 1980s and the 1990s hired developers for GNU.

What Grew Out of the Project

Today GNU is an extensive collection of free software: as of June 2025 it numbered 387 packages, most of them under the GPL licence. Its basic components include the GCC compilers, the glibc library, coreutils, the GDB debugger, binutils and the Bash shell. The project's own kernel, GNU Hurd, is still not considered ready for production, so GNU is usually used together with the Linux kernel. Such systems are called GNU/Linux, and a long-running dispute surrounds this name.

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.