GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!” has turned 30 years. Thanks to Richard Stallman (RMS) for this wonderful initiative along with lot many volunteers . The best part is over 30 years the project has grown to new dimension. We are using it many times in our day to day life without even knowing about it.
Hardly anyone who is using computer has not used GNU powered software. You can see the list of softwares which falls under it here. I am one of the lucky guy who did video interview of RMS in 2009 during his visit to New Delhi but unfortunately the video is not with me anymore. 🙁
The project is base of one of the most successful enterprise like IBM/Red Hat/Google/yahoo. Not only this most of the powerful supercomputers make use of GNU powered free software. I don’t have an example or place where i can/could say Free Software is not used. Even the proprietary operating system like Mac makes use of it.
Last not the least the popular kernel makes use of GNU and together makes GNU/Linux. Some popular softwares which you must have used includes emacs, GIMP, wget, Sed and many more listed here
The project needs your help and you can do the same in many ways listed here
Also you can celebrate 30th GNU birthday in many ways listed here
Please spread the word about it in ways you can by writing blog, organizing the event listed above. The best part of being in community is we can help it grow in many different ways and contributing upstream code is not the only one way. 🙂