Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!gatech!udel!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!zs04+ From: zs04+@andrew.cmu.edu (Zachary T. Smith) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: GNU story wanted! Message-ID: Date: 27 Jun 89 19:51:15 GMT References: <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU> Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 47 In-Reply-To: <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU> GNU is not an adjective or an American cliche. When you see a program whose name begins with GNU or which is said to be GNU software, it means that the software is free and that it comes from a group of people collectively known as the GNU organization (or thereabouts). GNU is an organization devoted to the task of rewriting the Unix, program by program, so that they may place its constituent parts into the public domain as they become available. The code they write is not shareware, but is free so long as the people who recieve it are willing to pass it on to others in need of it, unmodified. As it happens, lots of GNU code has been ported to MSDOS. GNU code being for the most part written to copy the functionality of Unix code, the existence of GNU stuff facilitates porting of Unix utilities to DOS. Eventually, they will have rewritten the entire thing, kernel and all. At present they've only managed to write the functional Unix equivalents of some of the major Unix utilities (GNU Emacs, GNU Awk, Bison (GNU Yacc), GDB (GNU dbx), Ghostscript (GNU postscript interpreter), GCC (GNU C compiler), G++ (GNU C++), Gnews (GNU mail system), etc.). Everything they write is intended to be portable to different architectures (GCC, for instance, can be set up to compile for any of about 20 processors). Their belief is that software, the OS in particular I believe, should be free. What this means is, sometime around year 2000 you'll be able to buy their variation of Unix for the cost of the disks (or modem time) and the work it'd take to install it. GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". It's a recursive acronym, just like XINU ("XINU Is Not Unix"). Also, for those interested, the not-yet-totally-existent GNU Unix clone is not the only clone out there. Mach, developed here at CMU, is essentially PD, though it's better to buy a copy from Mt. XINU (or buy a NeXT machine) if you want Mach. (Mach is not available for the 386, though.) -Zach Smith (zs04@andrew.cmu.edu)