Whats the relationship between GNU and Linux?
Richard Stallman: GNU is a Unix-like operating system whose development I started in 1984. GNU is not quite complete: the kernel of GNU has never worked very well. So we mostly use GNU with a different kernel, which is Linux. Linus Torvalds released the first version of Linux in 1991, and made it free software in 1992. The GNU/Linux system started out in 1992 as GNU with Linux added. Since then, many other programs have been added, but GNU is still the largest contribution. Linux was free software in the 90s, but no longer. Several years ago Torvalds began installing non-free firmware programs disguised as “source code” in the source files of Linux drivers. These programs take the form of long tables of numbers, which are actually a binary program; the source code for these programs is not released. Although these “blobs” follow the syntax of C, they are not the real source code of the program, and thus not free software. Many of them also carry explicit non-free licenses. We now maint
