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GNU is Not Unix

GNU Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary (fsf.org) 49

Posted by EditorDavid from the join-us-now-and-share-the-software dept.
Wednesday the Free Software Foundation celebrated "the 40th anniversary of the GNU operating system and the launch of the free software movement," with an announcement calling it "a turning point in the history of computing.

"Forty years later, GNU and free software are even more relevant. While software has become deeply ingrained into everyday life, the vast majority of users do not have full control over it... " On September 27, 1983, a computer scientist named Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop a free software Unix-like operating system called GNU, for "GNU's not Unix." GNU is the only operating system developed specifically for the sake of users' freedom, and has remained true to its founding ideals for forty years. Since 1983, the GNU Project has provided a full, ethical replacement for proprietary operating systems. This is thanks to the forty years of tireless work from volunteer GNU developers around the world.

When describing GNU's history and the background behind its initial announcement, Stallman (often known simply as "RMS") stated, "with a free operating system, we could again have a community of cooperating hackers — and invite anyone to join. And anyone would be able to use a computer without starting out by conspiring to deprive his or her friends."

"When we look back at the history of the free software movement — or the idea that users should be in control of their own computing — it starts with GNU," said Zoë Kooyman, executive director of the FSF, which sponsors GNU's development. "The GNU System isn't just the most widely used operating system that is based on free software. GNU is also at the core of a philosophy that has guided the free software movement for forty years."

Usually combined with the kernel Linux, GNU forms the backbone of the Internet and powers millions of servers, desktops, and embedded computing devices. Aside from its technical advancements, GNU pioneered the concept of "copyleft," the approach to software licensing that requires the same rights to be preserved in derivative works, and is best exemplified by the GNU General Public License (GPL). As Stallman stated, "The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular. So we needed to use distribution terms that would prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. The method we use is called 'copyleft.'"

The free software community has held strong for forty years and continues to grow, as exemplified by the FSF's annual LibrePlanet conference on software freedom and digital ethics.

Kooyman continues, "We hope that the fortieth anniversary will inspire hackers, both old and new, to join GNU in its goal to create, improve, and share free software around the world. Software is controlling our world these days, and GNU is a critique and solution to the status quo that we desperately need in order to not have our technology control us."
"In honor of GNU's fortieth anniversary, its organizational sponsor the FSF is organizing a hackday for families, students, and anyone interested in celebrating GNU's anniversary. It will be held at the FSF's offices in Boston, MA on October 1."
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GNU Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary More

GNU Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary

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  • Great stuff. GNU's been widely influential through Emacs. C compilers and such are governed by standards, but Emacs is the true leavening agent.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Not to mention standard libraries and command line utilities.

      Some of that stuff isn't as critical as it used to be, but without the GNU project linux wouldn't have got where it is today; we'd probably all be using some BSD derivative and Linux would be just another obscure kernel project.

      • The courts stopped BSD, not GNU (Score:5, Interesting)

        by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Saturday September 30, 2023 @01:55PM (#63890023)
        Nature abhors a vacuum. If not GNU for *nix userland someone else would have provided a solution. GNU got there first, that's it.

        The rise of Linux over BSD was not a GNU thing. It was a lawsuit thing. People wanted *nix on PC hardware. At the critical moment BSD was interrupted by a lawsuit and Linux was allowed to progress without such interference. Linux got to "useable" first. That's it. The GNU ideology road on the coattails of the desire for consumer PC based *nix.

        • Re:The courts stopped BSD, not GNU (Score:5, Informative)

          by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday September 30, 2023 @02:02PM (#63890051) Homepage Journal

          I remember making the choice to download debian 0.93R6 insted of 386BSD back in 1995. The lawsuit didn't actually stop BSD from being distributed or downloaded, but it played a part in my decision to use Debian instead of BSD. You think about these things before you spend all day downloading a boot and root installer onto a mountain of floppies.

          But if the GNU tools *hadn't* existed, Debian and Slackware wouldn't have existed and I absolutely would have downloaded BSD. The lawsuit I think definitely contributed to Linux's momentum, but it did not stop anyone from using BSD.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drnb ( 2434720 )

            I remember making the choice to download debian 0.93R6 insted of 386BSD back in 1995. The lawsuit didn't actually stop BSD from being distributed or downloaded, ...

            But it played a part in the progress of BSD development. Same timeframe as you, I tried FreeBSD since my CS program was unix based. It crashed. Then I tried Slackware. It did not crash. And so my 486 happily ran something that was highly compatible with my coursework. My PC's have dual booted ever since. Inertia.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dfghjk ( 711126 )

            386BSD was available a decade before that as well. BSD's vastly predate Linux AND BSD was open source. RMS and FSF didn't invent open source and the "GNU System" is irrelevant.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mendax ( 114116 )

              386BSD was available a decade before that as well. BSD's vastly predate Linux AND BSD was open source. RMS and FSF didn't invent open source and the "GNU System" is irrelevant.

              Hogwash! First, while good chunks of BSD were open-source, important parts of it were AT&T proprietary code, in other words, not open source! This problem was not rectified until after the lawsuit, the resolution of which did not occur until after Linux had been introduced and was a viable alternative to 386BSD.

              Second, while BSD

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by segin ( 883667 )
                Forcing people to share source changes is one of the reasons that Steve Ballmer was absolutely correct to call the GNU General Public License a "virus". If you care about software freedom, use the MIT or ISC licenses.

          • I got Linux (SLS) primarily because I could get a working system with fewer floppy disks. Because few people had home internet, even fewer with fast speeds, meaning I had to burn the floppies at work then take them home.

        • no evidence for that whatsoever (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          RMS's innovation was to require changes to be contributed back to the original source code and to not let chunks be taken for closed-source projects. Why would any company want to contribute back its "secret sauce" if it didn't have to? If the GPL had not come along, companies would continue to cherry pick parts of BSD (e.g., NT's use of the BSD TCP/IP stack) and BSD would continue to be developed by a handful of hobbyists and remain significantly less advanced than the closed-source alternatives. What turb

          • Re:no evidence for that whatsoever (Score:5, Insightful)

            by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Saturday September 30, 2023 @03:03PM (#63890215)

            "Why would any company want to contribute back its "secret sauce" if it didn't have to?"

            Because they want an OS to run on their hardware while minimizing development and maintenance costs.

            IBM contributed heavily, and happily, to Linux knowing that giving up "secret sauce" was required. They did it precisely for that reason. Just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean good reasons don't exist.

            "If the GPL had not come along, companies would continue to cherry pick parts of BSD..."

            And so what. The fact that so many think this is a problem is due to RMS and FSF propaganda.

            "BSD would continue to be developed by a handful of hobbyists and remain significantly less advanced than the closed-source alternatives."

            BSD was vastly superior, but Linux got the investment because of concern over IP, not because of the GPL. Were you born then, AC?

            "You can't just handwave away all these network effects by just saying "If it weren't for Linux something else would have come along.""

            But apparently you can make up stupid conclusions based on an ignorance of history.

            "It was a combination of the GPL and Linus Torvalds being a world-class project manager, basically lightning in a bottle."

            Educate yourself, fool.

            • Because they want an OS to run on their hardware while minimizing development and maintenance costs.

              Which is why iOS is completely open source.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drnb ( 2434720 )

            RMS's innovation was to require changes to be contributed back to the original source code and to not let chunks be taken for closed-source projects.

            Not quite, google, amazon, etc have proprietary versions of Linux, the secret sauce remains hidden, no problem with the GPL. These companies simply do not distribute versions with their secret sauce. Also, if release a binary, the secret sauce is published whether or not the source code was revealed. People will disassemble the binaries and learn any "secrets" contained in the binary.

            That said, the GPL is not responsible for Linux's success. People really really wanted *nix on consumer PC hardware. Linux

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          Right, and Linux got a crappy GNU copy of the BSD runtime rather than the real thing.

          GNU has absolutely nothing to do with the adoption of open source operating systems. That was GNU's dream, it was an abject failure, RMS blackmailed the industry to force his name onto projects he had nothing to do with, and now lies he about it.

          • Yeah no.

            The GNU utilities were streets ahead of the rather primitive old BSD and unix ones. Many more useful options, and you know actual updates based on how people use the tools to add new functionality which makes the tools better. The BSD community had a fetish for keeping things as spartan as possible.

            AWK is a particularly example, the BSD one is garbage compared to the GNU one. I don't really care about compatibility with an abandoned standard. I care about having the ENDFILE event rather than mucking

            • Yes, early on and in the early Linux time frame, BSD utilities were pretty simple. I do think GNU overcomplicated a lot. GNU did a lot of forcing some big progress in tools - such as GCC which was quickly far ahead of the Portable C Compiler, especially when dealing with RISC processors. Ie, they built new stuff rather than just port/maintain existing tools, which is the easier road in some ways when you need big new features.

              Though the GNU approach of being backwards compatible but with lots of new and

              • My gosh make! How could I forget that's one of my favorite ones. I think maybe it displaced the alternatives so thoroughly. I like gmake, it's also a fantastic tool.

                I agree on the other points too. Sometimes they went overboard with options, but overall I greatly prefer their tools. The code was always less clean. Apart from the insane indenting, the tools were portable to all sorts of weirdly broken systems, and generally high performance, so I guess that's forgivable that the code was a bit messy.

        • I don't use BSD back in the day.

          I did use the old Unix variants. Coming to Linux was a breath of fresh air. The GNU tools we re so so so much better, with no arbitrary limits and features that massively increased usability. That kind of thing was deeply unfashionable away from GNU/Linux. I used open bsd years later and while I loved it, it felt like a step back in time in some ways.

          Sure there was an alternative, but GNU showed the way.

        • Re:The courts stopped BSD, not GNU (Score:5, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday September 30, 2023 @05:06PM (#63890471) Homepage Journal

          GCC is the biggest achievement of GNU, IMHO. Development tools were expensive, and they made them free.

          From there so much else became possible, including Linux.

          If contributing to Linux has required a big investment in compilers, it wouldn't have become as big as it has.

          • GCC is awesome. It's a fantastically good compiler.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              It really is. Clang is faster to compile, but the output is often worse on ARM. It doesn't even support AVR, or I think 68k.

              Can't beat it for debugging. The preprocessor is great too. Only thing I'm not so hot on is in-line assembly, but I usually just make a separate function in an assembly only file.

              • I would also like to shout out the largely unsung GNU coreutils too. Back in the 90s when I started on these things, they were night and day compared to established players. The existing unixes were often clones of ancient SYSV tools, and BSD fetishised a kind of spartan minimalism.

                The GNU utils were often accused of "bloat", as if 386 level of bloat mattered on my P133, but to many of us, this meant they were a heck of a lot more usable.

                End result Linux was much, much nicer to use in many ways.

              • I do like the GCC inline assembler, because it allows more optimizations. A more typical inline assembler in C essentially has to but barriers before and after the code and probably invalidate all registers. The GCC syntax for it is a bit obtuse though, but you get better inline functions with it over having to make a full function in assembler. Granted most developers never touch assembler, but sometimes it's needed and when it is needed often it's because performance also matters.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  I agree it's a great feature. I just wish the syntax was a bit nicer. But maybe it can't be.

        • BSD was awful close though. I think Linux was more attractive for many people for 1) being a rebuild from scratch instead of just a port, and 2) being on a (weak) PC but more useful than Minix, meaning the hardware was more accessible to a home hobbyist. I know a lot of people who wanted BSD to get there earlier, as its code actually looked a lot nicer than GNU which was full of boilerplate so that it could be ultra-portable. However, when BSD did get a PC port it splintered a bit, the portability people

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        IF BSD hadn't been sued by AT&T, linux wouldn't have got where it is today; we'd definitely all be using some BSD derivative WITHOUT GNU runtime, a copy of BSD, at all.

        • I think we'd practically all still just be using Windows, buying it pre installed, just about as much as we are today.
    • Don't forget chess. It really classes up Linux compared to the Minesweeper level operating systems.

  • GNU Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary

    Congrats Boomer.

  • FSF are liars (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Saturday September 30, 2023 @02:48PM (#63890173)

    "The GNU System isn't just the most widely used operating system that is based on free software. GNU is also at the core of a philosophy that has guided the free software movement for forty years."

    False. Linux is the most widely used operating system based on free software. Linux is NOT the "GNU System", FSF and RMS are lying, as usual.

    Of course, this was all obvious when RMS threw a tantrum to get Linux distrbutions to add "GNU" to their product names. That was done to enable this lie.

    RMS is the Donald Trump of Open Source. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not RMS, not even people guilty of bigger evils than RMS. But we all deserve the end of RMS's malign influence on people's computing.

    • Well, when they're celebrating GNU's 40th they can't exactly crow about GNU/Hurd, since it's only 33. Even though it'll be ready and usable any. day. now.

      But regardless, GNU/Stallman did give use quite a few excellent tools - which I use pretty much every day. So Happy Birthday!

    • Your only point with which I disagree is about his ongoing influence. I'm not sure how much influence Stallman has on anything anymore. He hasn't contributed code in years, and last I looked, he wasn't contributing much to discussions other than arguing with others about direction for projects to which he's not contributing because of what was important to his personal use and not what most people were asking for.

      He's on the FSF board, but I don't know how much sway they still have, either, and that started

    • One minor problem with your premise: it's wrong.

      Her banded about GNU/Linux for years and we all thought he was a bit of a tit. Then android happened and people started touting Linux as winning in time mobile space. Except it wasn't the free and open system of Linux is was some mutant. The "silly" term he invented captured the differences perfectly.

      Honestly the guy is a bit of a skeezy dick bit he's also paranoid as fuck and has the annoying habit of getting it right

    • RMS believes âoeLinuxâ is just a kernel - âoeGNUâ is the Operating System. This - he is basically claiming they are responsible for the OS we call âoeLinuxâ.
    • Everywhere that uses Linux also uses GCC.

  • RMS was right. (Score:3)

    by DollyTheSheep ( 576243 ) on Sunday October 01, 2023 @11:40AM (#63891875)

    Stallman was right about walled software gardens. They became a reality with appstores.

  • Huzzah!

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