January 5, 1984: GNU Project Founded

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Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman

1984 – Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT to begin the writing of GNU software. GNU – a recursive acronym for “Not Unix” and reference to the song “the Gnu” – is an operating system that is compatible with Unix software. Stallman wanted to bring a free software operating system for the masses to use as they needed. The open source community would then be able to grow the OS with their own code additions.

Even though no real stable version of GNU yet exists, Linux is based on the GNU kernel.

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