:14:01
to start developing the GNU operating system.
:14:06
Now I should explain the name GNU is a hack.
:14:11
Because it's a recursive acronym.
:14:14
It stands for "GNU's Not Unix".
:14:18
You see so the "G" in "GNU" stands for "GNU".
:14:22
And what the name means is
:14:24
I was developing a system that was like
the Unix operating system,
:14:30
but was not the Unix operating system.
:14:33
This was a different system.
:14:34
We would have to write it completely
from scratch
:14:37
because Unix was proprietory.
:14:40
We were forbidden to share Unix,
:14:42
We couldn't use Unix.
It was useless for a community.
:14:46
So we had to write a replacement for it.
:14:52
Throughout the 1980s,
:14:54
as Richard Stallman was building the GNU project,
:14:57
computer scientists from
the University of California at Berkeley
:15:01
were developing their own free
operating system.
:15:05
Known as Berkeley Unix, or BSD,
:15:08
it was based upon the Unix kernel
which had been licensed from AT&T.
:15:13
However, due to legal problems with AT&T
and fragmentation of the source code,
:15:18
hackers and other non-institutional users
were slow to adopt it
:15:23
Well, Unix consisted of a large number of
separate programs
:15:28
that communicated with each other.
:15:30
So we just had to replace these programs
one by one.
:15:34
So what I started doing was
writing a replacement for one program,
:15:39
and then another, and then another,
:15:41
and then people started joining me,
:15:43
because I published an announcement
inviting other people to join me
:15:47
to help write these programs.
:15:50
And uh... and by around 1991,
we had replaced practically all of them.
:15:59
[ What were some of the programs that you ... ]