GNU project begins the free software movement
Richard Stallman announces plans to build a Unix-like system anyone can copy, study, and modify
Quick facts
- Founder
- Richard Stallman
- Announced
- September 1983
- Full name
- GNU ('GNU's Not Unix')
- Missing piece completed by
- Linus Torvalds's Linux kernel, 1991
What happened
Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, made the Initial Announcement of the GNU Project on a Usenet newsgroup in September 1983. GNU, a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix,' aimed to build a complete operating system compatible with Unix but made entirely of free software, meaning anyone could run, copy, study, and modify it without a proprietary license restricting them. Stallman personally wrote core pieces including the GNU Emacs editor and a C compiler; by 1990, the project had built or found nearly every major component of an operating system except one, the kernel, the core program that manages a computer's hardware and resources.
Why it matters
GNU supplied the surrounding tools and philosophy, but the operating system it needed was completed only when Linus Torvalds released a compatible kernel called Linux in 1991, made free software the following year; combined, the two became the GNU/Linux system that today runs the majority of the world's web servers and underlies Android phones.
How we know
The GNU Project's own history page, published by the Free Software Foundation, documents the September 1983 announcement, the project's goals, and its own account of how Linux completed the missing kernel piece.
Sources
- GNU Project / Free Software Foundation. Overview of the GNU System · Primary source (author-declared)gnu.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Computerworld. 'Free Unix!': The world-changing proclamation made 30 years ago today · General sourcecomputerworld.com · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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