As software became a product to be sold and locked down, Richard Stallman made the opposite bet. In 1983 he set out to build a complete free operating system, and to keep it free he invented a legal mechanism, copyleft, as clever in its way as any program.
The idea
Copyleft. Turn copyright against itself: license software so that anyone may use, study, change, and share it, on the condition that derivative works carry the same freedoms. Freedom becomes self-propagating rather than something each author must grant again.
The GNU Project
Stallman launched the GNU Project, publicly announced on 27 September 1983, with the goal of building a free Unix-compatible operating system. In October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation to support the work, hire developers, and promote the principles behind it.
The GPL
The GNU General Public License enforces copyleft by requiring derivative works to keep the same license terms. That single condition means free software cannot be quietly absorbed into a closed product and resold, which is what makes the freedom durable. The license is as much an invention as the code it covers.
GNU plus Linux
The GNU Project produced the tools and utilities of an operating system but, for years, lacked a finished kernel. Combined with the Linux kernel, the GNU software forms a complete Unix-like system. This is the free and open-source world whose origins, in the culture of Unix, the open-source note describes.
Related Notes
- Unix and Open Source, the culture GNU grew from and reshaped
- Multics, the ancestor of the Unix that GNU rebuilt freely
- History and Genealogy of Languages, the tools GNU reimplemented
- History of Computing, the section index
Sources
- “GNU,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU . Supports Richard Stallman launching the GNU Project (announced 27 September 1983) to build a free Unix-like operating system, the founding of the Free Software Foundation in October 1985, the GNU General Public License with its requirement that derivative works keep the same terms, and GNU combined with the Linux kernel forming a complete Unix-like system.