The GNU operating system consists of GNU packages (programs specifically released by the GNU Project) as well as free software released by third parties. The development of GNU made it possible to use a computer without software that would trample your freedom.
Use the GNU Guix functional package manager to install and manage GNU package releases. Use the GNU GSRC collection to easily install the latest GNU package releases on their own, without conflicting with any system versions.
The GNU operating system consists of GNU packages (programs specifically released by the GNU Project) as well as free software released by third parties. The development of GNU made it possible to use a computer without software that would trample your freedom.
The name of the system, GNU, is a recursive acronym meaning GNU's Not Unix—a way of paying tribute to the technical ideas of Unix, while at the same time saying that GNU is something different.
[1983] The Road to GNU — Richard Stallman describes the experiences that prepared him to fight for a free software world. Here are two postings that Stallman wrote for a bulletin board at Stanford while he was visiting there in May, 1983.
The GNU Project was conceived in 1983 as a way of bringing back the cooperative spirit that prevailed in the computing community in earlier days—to make cooperation possible once again by removing the obstacles to cooperation imposed by the owners of proprietary software.
Since 1983, developing the free Unix style operating system GNU, so that computer users can have the freedom to share and improve the software they use.
The GNU system includes programs that are not GNU software, programs that were developed by other people and projects for their own purposes, but which we can use because they are free software.
Linux is not a GNU package; that is, it wasn't developed under the GNU Project's aegis or contributed specifically to the GNU Project. Linus Torvalds wrote Linux independently, as his own project.
Non-GNU-based free system distributions are listed separately. The Free Software Foundation recommends and endorses these GNU/Linux distros, although we do not try to judge or compare them based on any criterion other than freedom; therefore, we list them in alphabetical order.
