I've met this word 'GNU', in many places as I'm living in this IT world. But I've never thought what is it and what does it stands for. I've been thinking that its convention or may be an organization which standardize the IT protocols and stuff like ISO & IEEE, or an organization which provides open source licences. Today only got a clear knowledge what it is.
GNU stands for GNU's not Unix!
GNU is a Unix like operating system which is available for zero cost. A Unix like operating system is a software collection of application, libraries, and developer tools, plus a program to allocate resources and talk to the hardware, known as a kernel. GNU is typically used with a kernel called Linux. This combination is the GNU/Linux operating system. GNU/Linux is used by millions, though many call it “Linux” by mistake.
GNU was launched by Richard Stallman in 1983, as an operating system which would be put together by people working together for the freedom of all software users to control their computing. As per GNU's philosophy, the GNU community stands that every single computer user have the rights o understand and control the process as he working on or with it. The primary and continuing goal of GNU is to offer a Unix-compatible system that would be 100% free software.
Many people, including my self a couple of moments before writing this are having a mind set that Linux and GNU are two separate entities. For example, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian or whatever the Linux distribution... Those distribution contains the Linux kernel. But on top of the kernal, the operating system which we are working on is GNU system. Kernal is the intermediate handler lies in between the operating system and the hardware devices. It make the system calls or interrupts to the devices according to the user input and deliver the responses to the OS. That's it.
All the Linux distributions are developed on top of Linux kernal. But the operating system which they contains is a par of GNU project. So those Linux distributions are the combination of Linux kernal and GNU system.
The GNU project has several licencing schemes for the GNU system. Anyone can obtain for his or her GNU system if it meets the GNU criteria. The GNU GPL, acronym for GNU General Public Licence is the famous licencing scheme known among open source communities. However there are several schemes available for GNU type projectsa
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