The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free software operating system GNU. The name ``GNU'' is a recursive acronym for ``GNU's Not Unix''. He is also the principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection, a portable optimizing compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.