The GNU Manifesto is Richard Stallman’s founding statement for the GNU Project, written to explain why he was building a complete free operating system and to ask others to help. It was published in March 1985, expanding on the project announcement Stallman had posted to Usenet in September 1983. The manifesto became one of the foundational documents of the free software movement, laying out both a goal and a moral argument.
The opening states the practical objective directly: “GNU, which stands for Gnu’s Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.” The name’s recursive joke, “Gnu’s Not Unix,” signals from the first line both the technical aim of Unix compatibility and the political aim of independence from the proprietary Unix that AT&T controlled.
Much of the essay is an ethical argument framed around the act of sharing. Stallman writes that “I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it,” and that software license agreements forbidding such sharing put him in a position he refuses to accept. From this premise he concludes that he must work on free software rather than proprietary software, even at personal cost, so that he can cooperate with other users rather than be made to betray them.
The manifesto anticipates and answers a long list of objections in a question-and-answer section: how programmers will be paid, whether free software can be high quality, whether anyone will work without the incentive of ownership, and whether the project is realistic at all. Stallman argues that proprietary software is fundamentally antisocial because it divides users and forbids them from helping one another, and that a free system would let people improve and adapt their tools and pass the improvements on. He also distinguishes early on between “free” as in freedom and “free” as in price, a distinction the movement would later sharpen into the Free Software Definition.
The GNU Manifesto set the agenda that produced the GNU tools, the GNU General Public License, and ultimately, combined with the Linux kernel, a complete free operating system. It remains hosted on gnu.org with notes that some of its wording has been lightly updated over the years, while its core argument, that users deserve the freedom to run, study, share, and change the software they rely on, has stayed constant.