The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984. The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free."[1] GNU is meant to be free, not in price, but in being unrestricted by other distributors to modify the program as necessary. Any programmer is therefore given full access to all source code and projects created using GNU, with the requirement of then posting any changes made publicly for other users to benefit from as well.
To make this happen, the GNU Project began working on an operating system called GNU ("GNU" is a recursive acronym that stands for "GNU's Not Unix"). This goal of making a free software operating system was achieved in 1992 when the last gap in the GNU system, a kernel, was filled by the third-party Linux kernel being released as Free Software, under version 2 of the GNU GPL.
Current work of the GNU Project includes software development, awareness building, political campaigning and sharing of the new material.