We are, of course not talking about the large deer like herbivore here, instead we are talking of the popular and fully free computer operating system. This is an operating system that actually dates back a couple of decades, when computer use was still in its nascent stage. The story goes that Richard Stallman, one of the creators of the software (most of it was developed by voulunteers), was a real believer of the free and unlimited dissemination of information and technology. He wanted that people should be free to learn the source code of the software they use, free to distribute the software among other people, and also to modify the performance of the software. They should also be free to publish their versions of the software so altered. Stallman’s salutary philosophy was published in March 1985 as the GNU Manifesto.

So committed and dedicated to his philosophy was Stallman that when he anticipated ownership issues, he gave up his job with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) because he was keen to see it being distributed as free software and did not want that his employment should interfere with that if issues of ownership intellectual property arose. As for the name, it is an allusion to the song ‘The Gnu’ among other things.

GNU (pronounced g’noo) is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Stallman’s original idea for free software has been carried forward and there is an on-going project by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) whose purpose is to create a complete, POSIX-compliant and freely distributable computing environment.

At the time that the GNU project came into being in 1983, Richard Stallman was trying to get funding for his freely distributable editor, Emacs. At that time, the various versions of Unix were bogged down with licenses that were restrictive and expensive. After Stallman made an announcement of his scheme he resigned from his job with MIT sop he could give full attention to the project.

Apart from the model GNU Manifesto, one more achievement of the GNU project was the GPL (GNU General Public License), developed in 1989 by Stallman and Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University and general counsel for the FSF. As a result of the efforts of these persons and others involved in the FSF, GNU general public license is the most universally used license for free software in the world. GNU software packages, the Linux kernel and much of the other software generally included in Linux distributions have been released under this license.

This license enshrines some lofty ideals, is “intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.” The license seeks to protect people’s freedom to distribute and modify free software as long as this is done is a responsible manner.