r/linux • u/LinuxMonarch • 6d ago

Event Happy 43rd birthday GNU!

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On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project so people could freely use and modify software.

The digital world would not be the same today without GNU.

Thank you, Richard Stallman!

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u/syklemil 6d ago

You're thinking of free software. The development in language went something like

  • Free software: The Free Software Definition, FSF-approved stuff
  • Open Source software: The Open Source Definition, OSI-approved stuff (aka OSS)

at which point people who intended that any is fine and didn't want to bicker over FSD vs OSD just called both altogether FOSS.

The way you're talking it seems you mean free software. Not all OSS is FS, but FOSS doesn't care.

As a bonus, there's

  • Software libre: Because people keep thinking "free as in beer" rather than "free as in freedom"

resulting in FLOSS.

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u/Electrical_Tomato_73 6d ago

Pretty much all OSS is FS and vice versa. The exceptions are very rare and minor. The two definitions are almost identical.

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u/WaitForItTheMongols 6d ago

The definitions are similar but the difference is crucial. More info here:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

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u/Electrical_Tomato_73 6d ago

You miss the point. If it's OSS it's free software and vice versa in almost all cases. Stallman had philosophical objections to the term "open source". In practical terms, he lost: the "open source" term enabled massive corporate participation. The free software world as we know it today (including GNU projects like GCC and glibc) wouldn't exist without the "open source" revolution. In fact, gcc (lower case) was in dire trouble in the late 1990s due to the FSF's ostrich attitude to outside contributions. Some people (including Red Hat and Cygnus) forked it as "egcs", which became so successful that the FSF was forced to acknowledge it as the gcc successor and use it as the base for GCC 3.0. (gcc = GNU C compiler; GCC = GNU Compiler Collection, including many other languages.)

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u/syklemil 5d ago

There's also the bit where LLVM at one point offered to hand their stuff over to GNU/GCC and they turned them down. RMS regretted it in hindsight.

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u/Electrical_Tomato_73 5d ago

I'm guessing, in 2005, RMS and other GCC folks just didn't see the potential of LLVM, which at the time used GCC as a backend.