Science and technology

Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I nonetheless love GNU 35 years later

GNU was publicly introduced on September 27, 1983, and at the moment has a robust following.

GNU is…

  • an working system
  • an in depth assortment of laptop software program
  • free software program
  • licensed underneath the GNU Project’s personal General Public License (GPL)

What else is GNU to you? Which device is your favourite? Here are 5 nice responses.

“My all-time favourite GNU device is GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. At a time when developer instruments have been costly, GCC was the second GNU device and the one which enabled a group to jot down and construct all of the others. This device single-handedly modified the business and led to the creation of the free software program motion, since a very good, free compiler is a prerequisite to a group creating software program.” —Dave Neary, Open Source and Standards crew at Red Hat

GNU Emacs was my first Unix utility, and I used it for all my programming. While at the moment I exploit totally different editors for various duties (vi to edit system recordsdata, GNOME gedit to edit my HTML pages for my web site, and many others., I at all times return to GNU Emacs once I write code. I’ve the muscle reminiscence in my fingers that makes Emacs really feel intuitive and a pure match once I’m programming in C.” —Jim Hall, creator of FreeDOS

GCC is a typical compiler for many Unix-like working methods. When I jumped into system programming a few years in the past, I invoked a language-specific driver program comparable to GCC for C, g++ for C++, and many others. which interprets command arguments, calls the precise compiler, runs the assembler on the output, after which optionally runs the linker to provide a whole executable binary.” —Daniel Oh, DevOps Evangelist at Red Hat

“I believe that dd is my favourite GNU utility. I first realized about it and have become fascinated with it when one in all my mentors referred to as it “disk destroyer,” which made me need to know why it was referred to as that. dd can be utilized for managed studying of an information stream from any system within the /dev listing after which sending that knowledge to different units. Used like this it may be a good way to discover the content material of laborious drives and USB reminiscence units. dd may also be used to repeat a bootable iso picture from a tough drive to a USB system to create a bootable, reside Linux picture that’s usable for demonstration or set up of Fedora, for instance. The dd utility can present the practical proof that every little thing is a file.” —David Both, Community Moderator for Opensource.com

“It’s not essentially a device, however one of many first issues I set up on each machine is GNU Backgammon. It’s my go-to, fast sport. It performs a extremely robust sport and is totally open supply. After one grueling morning of it utterly humiliating me at a few video games, I began griping about it in a gathering, saying I believe it cheats at cube. One of my colleagues pulled up the supply code that managed the cube roll and all of us poured over it. We needed to conclude that it had probably the most random code generator any of us had ever seen, and there was no method it cheated. I do not care although, I nonetheless assume it cheats. (wink)” —Andy Thornton, Senior Software Associate at Red Hat


What’s your favourite GNU device? Or share your story about utilizing GNU for the primary time within the feedback under.

Most Popular

To Top