The first task, I decided, had to be an operating system. Why is that? Because you've got to have an operating system to use your computer. If you have an operating system like UNIX, and nothing else, there are many things you can do with that. You can develop programs and debug them and run them. You can edit text and format books and print them out. You can exchange mail. Lots of useful things you can do. But if you have just an application program and no system, you can't do anything. You can't even run the application without a system. So we had to develop a free operating system as the first target. I decided we would make this system compatible with UNIX for a very specific reason. I didn't know what kind of computers people would be using five years or ten years later. I wanted to make a portable system, and UNIX gave a good model for how to do that. And then I decided, let's make this system compatible with UNIX; then all the UNIX users will find it painless to switch to our new system. Users don't like incompatible changes, after all, and we all knew that. So I decided to develop a UNIX compatible, portable, free software operating system. Then I needed a name. I gave it the name "GNU" for several reasons. One is the word "GNU" is one of the most humor-loaded words in the English language. The dictionary says it's pronounced [new], but pronouncing it [g-new] has always been the stuff of word play. There is even a clever funny song inspired by that word. But also "GNU" stands for "GNU is Not UNIX," which is a recursive acronym. It's a way of paying tribute to UNIX for its technical inspiration but at the same time stating the most important thing about this system; it's not UNIX. UNIX was proprietary software. UNIX we could not use; free men could not use UNIX. We had to have something different from UNIX, something that would enable us to be free. But what does it mean to say that "this is free software"? I'd better tell you more. "Free software" refers to a specific set of freedoms. This is crucial. After all, it's easy to say "I believe in freedom, "but if you don't get more specific, you are really not tackling the hard issues. The difficult problem is that some freedoms conflict with others. And in some cases, freedoms conflict with privileges that some people want to have. So the real difficult issues come when you wrestle with these conflicts: Which are the important freedoms that we should defend? Which are the secondary ones that have to give way? So, to confront these harder issues--that's the word I wanted, "confront"--I should give you the list of freedoms, the definition of free software. A program is free software for you if you can run it, study what it does and change it, redistribute copies, and publish an improved version. These are the necessary freedoms, because with these freedoms we can use the software to our advantage and we can form a community cooperating together. First, running the freedom to run the software. That's like having the freedom to cook the recipe and then eat the food. It's pretty obvious. If you are restricted in how you can eat the food, this recipe is not free, and you, the cook, are not free. Then there is the freedom to study what it does and change it so it does what you want. Now, with a recipe, nobody can stop you. If you see the recipe you see what the ingredients are; it's right there in words. But with computer programs there is a way they can stop you. They can distribute the binary form of the program, which is just a bunch of mysterious numbers. Yes, a programmer who studies it very hard can probably figure out what they do, but it's terribly hard work. It's known as "disassembly," and it's so hard that people only do it as a desperate last resort. To really understand the program, you have got to see the source code. So "free software" means you've got access to the source code. So at least if you know programming, you can read it and see what it does. Without that freedom there could be nasty features in there, backdoors, surveillance systems, and there is no way you can tell. Some part of Windows, I believe, has some location labeled NSA-Key-1. There is speculation that this is a backdoor for the national security agency, but it's very hard to tell what it does. Maybe it's just a joke by some Microsoft programmer. How do you know? Do you want to use that program? But if you had the source, you could read it and you could see what it does. You could also change it. You could fix bugs, add features, translate the commands and messages into Japanese, or whatever you like. This freedom is a tremendous benefit in practical terms to the users of free software.