this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
511 points (97.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43984 readers
786 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A lot of GNU software has some other FOSS equivalent that it can be replaced with. GCC, however, was basically the only production-worthy FOSS C/C++ compiler for a long time, until Clang came along.
GNU was the very first free Unix reimplementation project. Without it, maybe only excessively expensive commercial Unix systems would be available alongside Windows. Although 386BSD was also an early effort, the intense FUD campaign prevented it from being used for more serious purposes. At the time, GNU/Linux played a crucial role in competing against commercial Unix systems.