What does "GNU's not Unux" stand for?

[jashber]

This has puzzled me ever since I first heard it. The standard definition of GNU is, an acronym for "GNU is not Unix". Is it just me, or is that not an answer? What is GNU? Does that refer to the animal gnu? If so why are all the letters capitalized in the definition as though it were itself an acronym for something? What do gnus have to do with computer software anyway?! And why did they want the acronym be "GNU is not Unix"?

Can anyone enlighten me on this? Thanks a lot.

[anomie]

Recursive acronym. The *nix crowd has an odd sense of humor.

[jashber]

Yeah, but what about gnus? Why are we talking about gnus? Why does he need to say that gnus are not Unix? And why are all the letters in GNU capitalized as if it were an acronym itself?

[genesus]

GNU is an acronym it stands for "Gnu's Not Unix"

[anomie]

And why are all the letters in GNU capitalized as if it were an acronym itself?

Because it is. That's the recursion.

Same thing in many projects, e.g. LAME: LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder.

[oz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU

[genesus]

Or you could read more at www.gnu.org if, as me, you are philosophically against wiki...

[davebardsley]

genesus wrote:

Or you could read more at www.gnu.org if, as me, you are philosophically against wiki...

I understand this isn't related to the thread, but I am curious and am unable to resist; Why are you philosophically opposed to wiki?

[genesus]

Hmm...well I haven't exactly written an article about it; however, there are many points that hurt the idea of wiki, I'm not even so sure that it is a good idea to begin with. Try to change an entry to reflect something, in many cases it will be changed back very quickly. You can test this out, e.g. try to add something to wiki about scientology. The founder, a science fiction writer, once responded in an interview that if he wanted to make alot of money he would simply start a religion...add this to wiki and it will be reverted in a matter of minutes. Also, philosophically, I find it problematic to allow anyone the chance to participate in the creation and proliferation of knowledge. I would never allow a student to use wikipedia as a definitive source on a paper, anyone could write an article or change an article on any particular topic regardless of whether that person has ever done any serious research upon the said topic. I also tend to agree with Nietzsche when he, as Zarathustra, proclaimed that everyone being allowed to learn to read cheapens it for the rest of us...people write with letters, I only want to read what has been written with blood. Soul and truth are both sacrificed when the rable can have final say in what is true.

[a thing]

Whenever I looked up something I knew about on there, it was true. It's amazing that WikiMedia isn't a disaster.

GNU==GNU(GNU's Not Unix)'s Not Unix

The GNU project was founded in 1984, when Richard M. Stallman was sick of software that didn't give people freedom to use, copy, redistribute (gratis or for a fee), study and modify like software had always done before. So he started GNU, which is a project that aims to make an operating system that operates similar to UNIX that is only free software. In 1992, GNU had everything except a kernel. Then, Linus Torvalds started making a kernel (Linux) that was similar to the UNIX kernel, and ran GNU software on it, making a completely free operating system, GNU/Linux. After that, GNU's replacement for the UNIX kernel (Mach with the system of servers Hurd) wasn't worked on much until now.

About refering to a gnu, sort of. The GNU Project has a few pictures with gnus on their site.