Frequently Asked Question

What is the Free Software Foundation, and how does it relate to the GNU project?

Richard Stallman announced the GNU project in September 1983 as an effort to build a complete Unix-compatible operating system entirely from free software, software the user is free to run, study, modify, and redistribute. To provide legal and organisational scaffolding for the project he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985. The FSF holds the copyright on much of the GNU codebase, publishes the GPL family of licences, and campaigns on policy issues affecting software freedom.

By the early 1990s, GNU had a compiler (GCC), a C library (glibc), a shell (Bash), and most of the userland tools, but no production-ready kernel. Linus Torvalds's kernel, released in 1991, filled the gap, and the combination is what the FSF still calls GNU/Linux. The naming has been contested for thirty years, and modern distributions often replace large parts of the GNU stack (musl, BusyBox, systemd), but the philosophical framework the FSF laid down, the four freedoms, copyleft, the GPL, remains foundational to how the entire ecosystem thinks about licensing.