What is the GNU System?

GNU is a modern, commercial-grade operating system constituted of software components that respect the freedoms of computing device users. The GNU Project recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of its founder, Richard Stallman’s, announcement — in a Unix newsgroup — of his intention to build a complete, free operating system. The canonical tale tells of Stallman’s desire to fix a printer driver and being denied access to the source code. As the story goes, the refusal by the author of the printer driver to share the source so incensed Stallman that he launched the project to build the GNU System.