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Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
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Is the GNU project unsuccessful?

Recently over a conversation, my tech lead mentioned that he thinks the GNU project is a failure. His point of view is that after two decades they have never released a complete GNU operating system suitable for production use. He also mentioned that apart from Richard Stallman, no one else thinks of Linux as GNU/Linux. [He was glad to meet the second person].

I almost freaked out hearing this. Since then, I spoke to a few other people who felt the same. I was thinking to myself, this is what I call, “missing the forest for a tree“.

I think Free Software Foundation [FSF] is one of the most successful movements in the history of humanity. And I consider the GNU project as a big success. To justify this, we need to look at the history of the GNU project and the FSF in general.

In 1983, Richard Stallman quit this job at MIT to begin developing a free software operating system. His hope was that a free operating system would open a path to escape forever from the system of subjugation which is proprietary software. He had then experienced the ugliness of the way of life that non-free software imposes on its users, and he was determined to escape and give others a way to escape.

The word “free“ in “free software” pertains to freedom, not price. Once you have the software you have three specific freedoms in using it.
1. The freedom to copy the program and give it away to your friends and co-workers;
2. The freedom to change the program as you wish, by having full access to source code;
3. The freedom to distribute an improved version and thus help build the community.

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 it was important to remove the obstacles imposed by the owners of proprietary software.

FSF decided to make the operating system compatible with UNIX. A Unix-like operating system is much more than a kernel; it also includes compilers, editors, text formatters, mail software and many other things. Unfortunately many people think that an operating system means a kernel and everything else is secondary.

By 1990 FSF had either found or written all the major components except the kernel. By then Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds and made free software in 1992. Since Linus decided to release the Linux kernel under the GNU public license [GPL], FSF thought combining Linux with the almost-complete GNU system would be the right thing to do. Today we have a huge number of people who are using this operating system and are experiencing the freedom which Richard Stallman had dreamt of.

Another important point to consider is would Linux be possible without GCC and the other libraries which Linus used? Again I‘m not saying it would be impossible, but it‘s all about helping each other to solve a common problem.

Who cares if it is called Linux or GNU/Linux? GNU‘s intension was to come up with a free operating system. This does not mean they have to write everything from scratch. Their idea was to reuse whatever is available and write software which was not available or not free.

So today we do have a free operating system, which is been used and relished by countless users. The good news is for FSF the ultimate goal is to provide free software to do all of the jobs computer users want to do and thus make proprietary software obsolete.

Please remember, its freedom of software in the spirit of community building and not satisfying personal egos.

Must read : http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html


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