September 27, 1983 – Richard Startlman founded Project gnu (gnu’s not unix), with the aim of creating systemic components to develop a free alternative to Unix, eliminating the need for proprietary software. The GNU project forms a community of free projects working towards a common goal, guided by a unified ideology and philosophy.
Currently, under the umbrella of GNU, 385 free projects are being developed. These projects include GCC, Glibc, Bash, Emacs, Binutils, Classpath, Coreutils, Sysutils, DDD, Freefont, Gawk, GDB, Gettext, Ghostscript, Gimp, Gnash, Gnumeric, Gnupg, Gnutls, Hurd, Grub, Gzip, Linux-Libre core, Midnightcommand ER, Nano, Mediagoblin, Ncurses, Screen, and Wget.
Initially, the key elements of the project were the core GNU system, developer tools, and various applications and utilities for the user environment, including a text editor, a spreadsheet processor, a command shell, and even a collection of games. While the core GNU system did not gain significant distribution, the user environment and development tools were highly sought after and, in combination with the Linux kernel, formed the foundation of GNU/Linux distributions.