<body, project> /g*noo/ 1. A recursive acronym: "GNU's Not Unix!". The Free Software Foundation's project to provide a freely distributable replacement for Unix. The GNU Manifesto was published in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal but the GNU project started a year and a half earlier when Richard Stallman was trying to get funding to work on his freely distributable editor, Emacs.
Emacs and the GNU C compiler, gcc, two tools designed for this project, have become very popular. GNU software is available from many GNU archive sites.
See also Hurd.
2. <person> Noted Unix hacker John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>, founder of Usenet's anarchic alt.* newsgroup hierarchy.
(18 Apr 1995)