GNU is an operating system announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman, characterized by being completely free software. Its release date has not yet been announced, but Stallman's efforts, along with professionals and some assistants, focused on the development of the program has been reviewed on several occasions. The name, which is actually an acronym, refers to the similarities between the project and the Unix operating system, as well as the mascot they chose as their representative (the wildebeest), thus being "Gnu is Not Unix", that is, "Wildebeest is not Unix."
In 1985, Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation, in order to give legal, logistical and financial support to the GNU project. This was in charge of hiring developers and programmers who were given the task of rewriting and adapting a series of reused programs, such as the graphical X Window systemand the TeX surveying system; Despite this, much of the GNU system has been assembled through the contribution of volunteers. By 1990, a text editor called Emacs had been rewritten, well known for the time, the GCC compiler had been created, the Shell Bash command interpreter. However, there was not yet a nucleus, since, until now, the Hurd nucleus, due to differences between the personnel in charge of its development and various technical programs, was not fully mature until the year 2000.
Currently, the programs developed by GNU have been transported to other operating systems, such as Windows and MAC, being known as "GNU tools". Likewise, they have been used as replacements for the original UNIX programs.
