the gnu manifesto, written by richard stallman in nineteen.eighty.five for the n
ew gnu project ... whats gnu. gnus not unix. ... gnu, which stands for gnus not 
unix, is the name for the complete unix.compatible software system which i am wr
iting so that i can give it away free to everyone who can use it. several other 
volunteers are helping me. contributions of time, money, programs and equipment 
are greatly needed. so far we have an emacs text editor with lisp for writing ed
itor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc.compatible parser generator, a li
nker, and around thirty.five utilities. a shell command interpreter is nearly co
mpleted. a new portable optimizing c compiler has compiled itself and may be rel
eased this year. an initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to e
mulate unix. when the kernel and compiler are finished, it will be possible to d
istribute a gnu system suitable for program development. we will use tex as our 
text formatter, but an nroff is being worked on. we will use the free, portable 
x window system as well. after this we will add a portable common lisp, an empir
e game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things, plus online documentation. 
we hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a unix
 system, and more. gnu will be able to run unix programs, but will not be identi
cal to unix. we will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our exp
erience with other operating systems. in particular, we plan to have longer file
 names, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, file name completion per
haps, terminal.independent display support, and perhaps eventually a lisp.based 
window system through which several lisp programs and ordinary unix programs can
 share a screen. both c and lisp will be available as system programming languag
es. we will try to support uucp, mit chaos.net, and internet protocols for commu
nication. gnu is aimed initially at machines in the class with virtual memory, b
ecause they are the easiest machines to make it run on. the extra effort to make
 it run on smaller machines will be left to someone who wants to use it on them.
 to avoid horrible confusion, please pronounce the g in the word gnu when it is 
the name of this project. ... why i must write gnu ... i consider that the golde
n rule requires that if i like a program i must share it with other people who l
ike it. software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each 
user agree not to share with others. i refuse to break solidarity with other use
rs in this way. i cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a 
software license agreement. for years i worked within the artificial intelligenc
e lab to resist such tendencies and other in.hospitalities, but eventually they 
had gone too far i could not remain in an institution where such things are done
 for me against my will. so that i can continue to use computers without dishono
r, i have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that i w
ill be able to get along without any software that is not free. i have resigned 
from the ai lab to deny mit any legal excuse to prevent me from giving gnu away.