GNU Licenses

24 Oct 2016

GNU/Linux

The goal of the GNU project is to promote free software. Richard Stallman started the project. By free software, he means freedom for users. He describes four things

• A user should be able to freely use the software for whatever purpose he wants.
• A user should be able to modify the program to suite his/her needs.
• A user should have the freedom to redistribute the software copies.
• A user should be able to distribute modified versions of the software.

He felt that the first thing to do to promote free software is to develop a free operating system. The first software package developed as a part of it is GNU Emacs. Some other packages developed were GCC compiler, GNOME and so-on. The kernel used was Linux kernel developed by linus torvalds. So, the operating system is called as GNU/Linux. All the linux distros are based from GNU/Linux. However, only some distros are treated by the GNU project as GNU/Linux distros. Here is the list of GNU/Linux distros. The most popular linux distros are not endorsed by GNU because of mainly two reasons.

• The distros dont have a policy of only including free software and remove non-free software if it is discovered.
• The kernel they distribute contains only blobs and no source code.

References:

• https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
• https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html