“A remarkable continuity underlies free software, going all the
way back to Richard Stallman’s first programs for his new GNU
project. And yet within that continuity, there have been major
shifts: are we due for another such leap?“In the beginning, RMS (Richard Matthew Stallman) was focussed
on creating a Unix-like system:“To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities
needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler,
linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a
text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds
of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful
that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful,
including on-line and hard copy documentation.”