The GNU Manifesto

The GNU Manifesto is one of the first documents stating the goals of the free software movement.

- The GNU Manifesto was written by Richard Stallman. It was published in March 1985, explaining the purpose and philosophy of the GNU Project, which was undertaken to create a non-proprietary Unix-like operating system. It is also a call for participation and support. It is held in high regard within the free software movement as a fundamental philosophical source.

- The context in 1985 having to do with computer industry was aproximately like this:

  USA   The Atari ST, an inexpensive 8 MHz Motorola 68000-based computer, appeared.
  USA   MS-DOS 3.1, PC-DOS 3.1 released.
  USA   Symbolics registered the symbolics.com domain, the first .com domain in the world.
  USA   Expanded memory specification, a memory paging scheme for PCs, was introduced by Lotus and Intel.
  USA   Commodore 128 was released. Based on a complex multi-mode architecture, this was Commodore's last 8-bit computer. Cost: $299.95 for each of the CPU unit and accompanying 1571 disk drive.
  USA   Commodore released the Amiga, based on a 7.16 MHz Motorola 68000 and a custom chipset. It was the first home computer to feature pre-emptive multitasking operating system. It used a Macintosh-like GUI. Cost: US$1,295 for a system with a single 880 KB 3.5 in disk drive and 256 KB of RAM.
  USA   80386 DX released. It supports clock frequencies of up to 33 MHz and can address up to 4 GB of memory (and in theory virtual memory of up to 64 TB, which was important for marketing purposes). It also includes a bigger instruction set than the 80286.
  USA   Microsoft Windows launched. Not really widely used until version 3, released in 1990, Windows required DOS to run and so was not a complete operating system
  USA   MS-DOS 3.2, PC-DOS 3.2

  So, basically, MS-DOS was growing as the PC Operating System, while UNIX was the preferred system on the rest of environments (Government, Universities, etc.).
  FSF states: "By the 1980s, almost all software was proprietary, which means that it had owners who forbid and prevent cooperation by users. This made the GNU Project necessary"
  GNU was proposed as alternative to both, and proposed as a, somehow, free Operating System inspired by Unix. Richard Stallman asserts on GNU Manifesto:
  "Unix is not my ideal system, but it is not too bad. The essential features of Unix seem to be good ones, and I think I can fill in what Unix lacks without spoiling them. And a system compatible with Unix would be convenient for many other people to adopt.

- The immediate consequences of the GNU Manifesto were:
  * Many other programmers who were excited about GNU wanted to help. Many programmers showed their desire to contribute part-time work for GNU.
  * Prominent and reliable software components were started to be written:
    - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)
    - The GNU C Library (glibc)
    - The GNU Emacs text editor
    - The Bash (Unix shell)
    - The GNOME desktop environment

  Not so immediate, but also important, was to acomplish the GNU-Linux Complete Operating System.
  * By 1990 all the major components of a Free Operating System were written except one: "the kernel". Then Linux, a Unix-like kernel, was developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and made free software in 1992. Combining Linux with the almost-complete GNU system resulted in a complete operating system: the GNU/Linux system. Estimates are that tens of millions of people now use GNU/Linux systems. Moreover this, it is the preferred Operating System used in Servers.

  The full text of GNU Manifesto is included with GNU software such as Emacs, and is available on the web [1]

- Initial releases of main GNU project programs were:
  1985, March    20: GNU Emacs - Version 13.0 is released
  1987, May        23: GCC - Version 1.0 is released
  1988, February   : glibc - FSF described glibc as having nearly completed the functionality required by ANSI C.
  GNOME was published very much later. First release was introduced on 1999.

  References:
  [1] - http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
  [2] - http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html