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acronym). More than that, he tried to convince the world that code should be
Free with a capital “F”. By this, he meant that it was unreasonable to provide
software without both providing the source code and the right to use and
modify that code as desired. To ensure this, he and his team created the GPL
2
(the GNU Public License) and founded the Free Software Foundation
3
to foster
development and promote the idea.
The story of the founding of GNU/FSF and the motivations behind it
4
makes for a fascinating reading. Even if you are not interested in Free Software,
the story prompts you to think in new ways about software, property, and
freedom. As interesting as this story is, it is not our topic. The important thing
is how the quest to create a Free operating system lead to a native Java compiler
and the twists and turns on this way.
7.3
T
HE
GNU C
OMPILER
C
OLLECTION
If you are going to write a UNIX-like operating system, and one that is “Free”
(certainly free of anyone else's intellectual property which might be restricted
from the Free Software point of view), the first thing you need is a C compiler.
Thus, a great deal of early effort by the FSF went into developing what was
originally called the GNU C Compiler, or
gcc
.
Once they had a C compiler, some people began to write hundreds of
utilities from
ls
to
grep
, while others began work on HURD, a microkernel for
GNU. That work continues to this day. The bulk of the system commands you
use on Linux were in fact developed by the FSF as part of the GNU project.
This is why Stallman et al. want us all to refer to “GNU/Linux” rather than
“Linux”.
5
An understandable, if unenforceable, position.
It wasn't long before an effort began to integrate C++ into
gcc
. As time
progressed, support for more and more languages and for more and more
2.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
3.
http://www.fsf.org/
4.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
5. A viewpoint we understand and appreciate, but we do not bow to is that we must
always
say
“GNU/Linux.” We say it sometimes, but it gets tedious and annoying if used all the time. So
we compromise. We tell you about GNU, but we'll usually say just “Linux” in the text.
