A quarter century of GNU

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF project that gets the most buzz in the media, of course, the GNU General Public License, which serves as the underpinning of many high-visibility open-source projects.

Writing about the GPL is great sport, especially because it drives some commercial developers (like Microsoft) into conniptions. We technology analyst and journalists love a good theatre, and Microsoft vs. GPL will be selling popcorn for many, many years.

If you focus on just the GPL, and Richard Stallman’s unwavering advocacy for free and open-source software, you’re missing what I consider to be the real goodness: the bits created by the GNU Project.

Consider the GNU Compiler Collection. gcc is the de facto standard everywhere (except in the Microsoft-specific world). Even where you have commercial compilers, such as those from Intel, the baseline for compatibility and performance is the gcc.

Want more? There’s the Emacs editor, the gdb debugger, the GIMP image manipulation program, the Mailman listserve software, the gawk string-manipulation language, and dozens of other tools, utilities and applications. The software create by the GNU Project tend to be ignored, mainly because they just work, but also because they don’t present the drama inherent in software licensing.

So, we celebrate a quarter century of the GNU Project. See Alex Handy’s coverage of the GNU anniversary and of the latest updates to gcc. And remember, there’s more to the Free Software Foundation than license squabbles with Microsoft.