History
Plans for GNU, a complete computer operating system composed entirely of free software, were made in 1983 by Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. In September of that year, Stallman published his manifesto in Dr. Dobb's Journal detailing his new project publicly, and outlining his vision of free software. Software development work began in January 1984. GNU was to be a complete Unix-like operating system composed entirely of free software. By 1991, the GNU mid-level portions of the operating system were almost complete, and the upper level could be supplied by the X Window System, but the lower level (kernel, device drivers, system-level utilities and daemons) was still mostly lacking. The GNU kernel, GNU Hurd, was still in its infancy. The Hurd followed an ambitious design which proved unexpectedly difficult to implement and has only been marginally usable.
In 1991, the first version of the Linux kernel was released by Linus Torvalds. Early Linux kernel developers ported GNU code, including the GNU C Compiler, to run on Linux. Later, when the GNU developers learned of Linux, they adapted other parts of GNU to run on the Linux kernel. This work filled the remaining gaps in running a completely free operating system.
Over the next few years, there were a number of suggestions for how to name operating systems using the Linux kernel and GNU components. In 1992, the Yggdrasil Linux distribution adopted the name "Linux/GNU/X". In Usenet and mailing-list discussions, one can find usages of "GNU/Linux" as early as 1992 and of "GNU+Linux" as early as 1993. The Debian project switched to calling itself "GNU/Linux" in early 1994; Debian founder Ian Murdock later noted that this change was made in response to a request by Richard Stallman (who initially proposed "Lignux," but suggested "GNU/Linux" instead after hearing complaints about the awkwardness of the former term). GNU's June 1994 Bulletin describes "Linux" as a "free Unix system for 386 machines" (with "many of the utilities and libraries" from GNU), but the January 1995 Bulletin switched to the term "GNU/Linux" instead. Stallman's and the FSF's efforts to include "GNU" in the name started around 1994, but were reportedly mostly via private communications (such as the abovementioned request to Debian) until 1996. In May 1996, Stallman released Emacs 19.31 with the Autoconf system target "linux" changed to "lignux" (shortly thereafter changed to "linux-gnu" in emacs 19.32), and included an essay "Linux and the GNU system" suggesting that people use the terms "Linux-based GNU system" (or "GNU/Linux system" or "Lignux" for short). He later used "GNU/Linux" exclusively, and the essay was superseded by Stallman's 1997 essay, "Linux and the GNU project".
Read more about this topic: GNU/Linux Naming Controversy
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