Gnu project

             This is a somewhat bowlderized history; please check the specifics before basing any research papers on it.
             Unix came to be back in 1969. and has evolved a great deal since then. It was reimplemented in C during 1972-1974, and is therefore the first source-portable operating system. Currently there are a wide variety of implementations of it, with varying degrees of compatibility, from a variety of vendors - Sun, Silicon Graphics, SCO, HP, IBM, etc.
             It quickly became a favorite among programmers and serious technical types, which significantly shaped its evolution to make it a very friendly and powerful OS for the kinds of uses that those types tended to put it to. The early dominion of AT&T, its high cost, and, as time went on, the greater disparities between other versions of the OS created a great need for a common, free Unix-like OS. The fact that the user base had a large contingent of system and application programmers meant that the ability to fill that need was there. So GNU was born.
             GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's not Unix!", has the primary goal of building a complete, freely-distributable, open-source Unix-like operating system. The GNU General Public License is the most common example of a free-software license - it requires that the source code be made available with any distribution of the software, allows any modification provided that the source code for those modifications be made available as well. GNU began systematically replacing all the standard Unix utilities - editors, archivers, shells, compilers, etc. - with open-source, free versions. As volunteers worked on the utilities, they became better and more featureful than the originals, and thus quite often any machine running a commercial Unix variant would stock GNU versions of utilities to take advantage of these features and to have a standardized version of them.
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Gnu project. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 20:41, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/87895.html