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 <h2>Linux and the GNU System</h2>
 
 <address class="byline">by <a
 href="https://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a></address>
 
 <p>
 Many computer users run a modified version of
 <a href="/philosophy/categories.html#TheGNUsystem">the GNU system</a>
 every day, without realizing it.  Through a peculiar turn of events,
 the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called
 &ldquo;Linux,&rdquo; and many of its users
 are <a href="/gnu/gnu-users-never-heard-of-gnu.html"> not aware</a>
 that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the
 <a href="/gnu/gnu-history.html">GNU Project</a>.</p>
 
 <div class="announcement comment" role="complementary">
 <hr class="no-display" />
 <p>For more information see also
 the <a href="/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html">GNU/Linux FAQ</a>,
 and <a href="/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html">Why GNU/Linux?</a></p>
 <hr class="no-display" />
 </div>
 
 <p>
 There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just
 a part of the system they use.  Linux is the kernel: the program in
 the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other
 programs that you run.  The kernel is an essential part of an
 operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the
 context of a complete operating system.  Linux is normally used in
 combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is
 basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux.  All the so-called
 &ldquo;Linux&rdquo; distributions are really distributions of
 GNU/Linux.</p>
 
 <p>
 Many users do not understand the difference between the kernel, which
 is Linux, and the whole system, which they also call
 &ldquo;Linux.&rdquo;  The ambiguous use of the name doesn't help
 people understand.  These users often think that Linus Torvalds
 developed the whole operating system in 1991, with a bit of help.</p>
 
 <p>
 Programmers generally know that Linux is a kernel.  But since they
 have generally heard the whole system called &ldquo;Linux&rdquo; as well, they
 often envisage a history that would justify naming the whole system
 after the kernel.  For example, many believe that once Linus Torvalds
 finished writing Linux, the kernel, its users looked around for other
 free software to go with it, and found that (for no particular reason)
 most everything necessary to make a Unix-like system was already
 available.</p>
 
 <p>
 What they found was no accident&mdash;it was the not-quite-complete GNU
 system.  The available <a href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
 software</a> added up to a complete system because the GNU Project
 had been working since 1984 to make one.  In
 the <a href="/gnu/manifesto.html"> GNU Manifesto</a> we set forth
 the goal of developing a free Unix-like
 system, called GNU.  The <a href="/gnu/initial-announcement.html">
 Initial Announcement</a> of the GNU Project also outlines some of the
 original plans for the GNU system. By the time Linux was started, GNU
 was almost finished.</p>
 
 <p>
 Most free software projects have the goal of developing a particular
 program for a particular job.  For example, Linus Torvalds set out to
 write a Unix-like kernel (Linux); Donald Knuth set out to write a text
 formatter (TeX); Bob Scheifler set out to develop a window system (the
 X Window System). It's natural to measure the contribution of this
 kind of project by specific programs that came from the project.</p>
 
 <p>
 If we tried to measure the GNU Project's contribution in this way,
 what would we conclude?  One CD-ROM vendor found that in their &ldquo;Linux
 distribution,&rdquo; <a href="/philosophy/categories.html#GNUsoftware">GNU
 software</a> was the largest single contingent, around 28% of the
 total source code, and this included some of the essential major
 components without which there could be no system.  Linux itself was
 about 3%.  (The proportions in 2008 are similar: in the &ldquo;main&rdquo;
 repository of gNewSense, Linux is 1.5% and GNU packages are 15%.)
 So if you were going to pick a name for the system based on
 who wrote the programs in the system, the most appropriate single
 choice would be &ldquo;GNU.&rdquo;</p>
 
 <p>
 But that is not the deepest way to consider the question.  The GNU
 Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific software
 packages.  It was not a project <a href="/software/gcc/"> to
 develop a C compiler</a>, although we did that.  It was not a project
 to develop a text editor, although we developed one.  The GNU Project
 set out to develop <em>a complete free Unix-like system</em>: GNU.</p>
 
 <p>
 Many people have made major contributions to the free software in the
 system, and they all deserve credit for their software.  But the
 reason it is <em>an integrated system</em>&mdash;and not just a
 collection of useful programs&mdash;is because the GNU Project set out
 to make it one.  We made a list of the programs needed to make
 a <em>complete</em> free system, and we systematically found, wrote,
 or found people to write everything on the list.  We wrote essential
 but unexciting&#8239;<a class="ftn" href="#unexciting">[1]</a> components
 because you can't have a system
 without them.  Some of our system components, the programming tools,
 became popular on their own among programmers, but we wrote many
 components that are not tools&#8239;<a class="ftn" href="#nottools">[2]</a>.  We even
 developed a chess game, GNU Chess, because a complete system needs
 games too.</p>
 
 <p>
 By the early 90s we had put together the whole system aside from the
 kernel.  We had also started a kernel, the
 <a href="/software/hurd/hurd.html">GNU Hurd</a>, which runs on top of
 Mach.  Developing this kernel has been a lot harder than we expected;
 <a href="/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html">the
 GNU Hurd started working reliably in 2001</a>, but it is a long way
 from being ready for people to use in general.</p>
 
 <p>
 Fortunately, we didn't have to wait for the Hurd, because of Linux.
 Once Torvalds freed Linux in 1992, it fit into the last major gap in
 the GNU system.  People could
 then <a href="https://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/historical/kernel/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01">
 combine Linux with the GNU system</a> to make a complete free system&mdash;a
 version of the GNU system which also contained Linux.  The
 GNU/Linux system, in other words.</p>
 
 <p>
 Making them work well together was not a trivial job.  Some GNU
 components&#8239;<a class="ftn" href="#somecomponents">[3]</a> needed substantial change
 to work with Linux.  Integrating a complete system as a distribution
 that would work &ldquo;out of the box&rdquo; was a big job, too.  It
 required addressing the issue of how to install and boot the
 system&mdash;a problem we had not tackled, because we hadn't yet
 reached that point.  Thus, the people who developed the various system
 distributions did a lot of essential work.  But it was work that, in
 the nature of things, was surely going to be done by someone.</p>
 
 <p>
 The GNU Project supports GNU/Linux systems as well as <em>the</em> GNU
 system.  The <a href="https://fsf.org/">FSF</a> funded the rewriting of
 the Linux-related extensions to the GNU C library, so that now they
 are well integrated, and the newest GNU/Linux systems use the current
 library release with no changes.  The FSF also funded an early stage
 of the development of Debian GNU/Linux.</p>
 
 <p>
 Today there are many different variants of the GNU/Linux system (often
 called &ldquo;distros&rdquo;).  Most of them include nonfree
 programs&mdash;their developers follow
 the <a href="/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html">&ldquo;open
 source&rdquo; philosophy</a> associated with Linux rather than the
 <a href="/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html">&ldquo;free
 software&rdquo; philosophy</a> of GNU.  But there are also
 <a href="/distros/distros.html">completely free GNU/Linux distros</a>.
 The FSF supports computer facilities for a few of them.</p>
 
 <p>Making a free GNU/Linux distribution is not just a matter of
 eliminating various nonfree programs.  Nowadays, the usual version of
 Linux contains nonfree programs too.  These programs are intended to
 be loaded into I/O devices when the system starts, and they are
 included, as long series of numbers, in the &ldquo;source code&rdquo; of Linux.
 Thus, maintaining free GNU/Linux distributions now entails maintaining
 a <a href="https://directory.fsf.org/project/linux"> free version of
 Linux</a> too.</p>
 
 <p>Whether you use GNU/Linux or not, please don't confuse the public
 by using the name &ldquo;Linux&rdquo; ambiguously.  Linux is the
 kernel, one of the essential major components of the system.  The
 system as a whole is basically the GNU system, with Linux added.  When
 you're talking about this combination, please call it
 &ldquo;GNU/Linux.&rdquo;</p>
 
 <p>
 If you want to make a link on &ldquo;GNU/Linux&rdquo; for further
 reference, this page and <a href="/gnu/thegnuproject.html">
 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html</a> are good choices.  If
 you mention Linux, the kernel, and want to add a link for further
 reference, <a href="https://foldoc.org/linux">https://foldoc.org/linux</a> 
 is a good URL to use.</p>
 <div class="column-limit"></div>
 
 <h3 class="footnote">Postscripts</h3>
 
 <p>
 Aside from GNU, one other project has independently produced
 a free Unix-like operating system.  This system is known as BSD, and
 it was developed at UC Berkeley.  It was nonfree in the 80s, but
 became free in the early 90s.  A free operating system that exists
 today&#8239;<a class="ftn" href="#newersystems">[4]</a> is almost certainly either a
 variant of the GNU system, or a kind of BSD system.</p>
 
 <p>
 People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a version of GNU, like
 GNU/Linux.  The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free
 software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from
 GNU activists helped persuade them, but the code had little overlap
 with GNU.  BSD systems today use some GNU programs, just as the GNU
 system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as
 wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately.  The
 BSD developers did not write a kernel and add it to the GNU system,
 and a name like GNU/BSD would not fit the situation&#8239;<a class="ftn"
 href="#gnubsd">[5]</a>.</p>
 <div class="column-limit"></div>
 
 <h3 class="footnote">Footnotes</h3>
 <ol>
 <li id="unexciting">These unexciting but essential components
 include the GNU assembler (GAS) and the linker (GLD), both
 are now part of the <a href="/software/binutils/">GNU Binutils</a>
 package, <a href="/software/tar/">GNU tar</a>, and many more.</li>
 
 <li id="nottools">For instance, The Bourne Again SHell (BASH),
 the PostScript interpreter
 <a href="/software/ghostscript/ghostscript.html">Ghostscript</a>, and the
 <a href="/software/libc/libc.html">GNU C library</a> are not
 programming tools.  Neither are GNUCash, GNOME, and GNU Chess.</li>
 
 <li id="somecomponents">For instance, the
 <a href="/software/libc/libc.html">GNU C library</a>.</li>
 
 <li id="newersystems">Since that was written, a nearly-all-free
 Windows-like system has been developed, but technically it is not at
 all like GNU or Unix, so it doesn't really affect this issue.  Most of
 the kernel of Solaris has been made free, but if you wanted to make a
 free system out of that, aside from replacing the missing parts of the
 kernel, you would also need to put it into GNU or BSD.</li>
 
 <li id="gnubsd">On the other hand, in the years since this article
 was written, the GNU C Library has been ported to several versions of
 the BSD kernel, which made it straightforward to combine the GNU system
 with that kernel.  Just as with GNU/Linux, these are indeed variants of
 GNU, and are therefore called, for instance, GNU/kFreeBSD and
 GNU/kNetBSD depending on the kernel of the system.  Ordinary users on
 typical desktops can hardly distinguish between GNU/Linux and
 GNU/*BSD.</li>
 </ol>
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 There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
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 <p>Copyright &copy; 1997-2002, 2005, 2008, 2019, 2021 Richard Stallman</p>
 
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