ioana:

Linux first appered in October, 1991. Linus Torvalds, the author, had used Unix at the University of Helsinki, and wanted something similar on his PC at home. Since the commercial alternatives were way too expensive, he started out with Minix, but wanted something better and soon started to write his own operating system. After its first release, it soon attracted the attention of several other hackers. While Linux initially was not really useful except as a toy, it soon gathered enough features to be interesting even for people uninterested in operating system development.

The GNU operating system is a complete free software system, upward-compatible with Unix. GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”. Richard Stallman made the Initial Announcement of the GNU Project in September 1983. A longer version called the GNU Manifesto was published in September 1985. It has been translated into several other languages.

The project to develop the GNU system is called the “GNU Project”. The GNU Project was conceived in 1983 as a way of bringing back the cooperative spirit that prevailed in the computing community in earlier days–to make cooperation possible once again by removing the obstacles to cooperation imposed by the owners of proprietary software.

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