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.
It was called the GNU Project, and was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups by Stallman.
Software development began on January 5, 1984, when Stallman quit his job at the Lab so that they could not claim ownership or interfere with distributing GNU components as free software.
This philosophy was published as the GNU Manifesto in March 1985. Richard Stallman's experience with the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), an early operating system written in assembly language that became obsolete due to discontinuation of PDP-10, the computer architecture for which ITS was written, led to a decision that a portable system was necessary.
In October 1985, Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
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 of GNU software, as well as a large number of free software programs that are not part of the GNU Project; it also historically has been the most commonly used free software license (though recently challenged by the MIT license).
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.
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 the GNU C Library to allow it to be linked with proprietary software.
The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), for documentation, followed in 2000.
The GPL and LGPL were revised to version 3 in 2007, adding clauses to protect users against [restrictions] that prevent users from running modified software on their own devices. Besides GNU's packages, the GNU Project's licenses are used by many unrelated projects, such as the Linux kernel, often used with GNU software.
GNU programs have been shown to be more reliable than their proprietary Unix counterparts. As of November 2015, there are a total of 466 GNU packages (including decommissioned, 383 excluding) hosted on the official GNU development site. ==GNU as an operating system== In its original meaning, and one still common in hardware engineering, the operating system is a basic set of functions to control the hardware and manage things like task scheduling and system calls.
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