The birth of GNU

In the beginning of the Computing Industry, Hacker culture was the norm of the day. Before proceeding, lets clarify the term hacker. 'Hackers' are folks who want to program intelligently and differently to solve a computing problem. They pursue these goals and end up finding new solutions and ideas. Now if you note, nowhere did we mention that they aim at harming others programs or being malicious. That is the trait of 'Crackers'. In short, Hackers=Smart programmers, Crackers=Malicious programmers. This clear distinction is important because there is a lot of confusion and mis-information out there about the term 'Hacker'.
Now returning to my first statement of the blog, (In the beginning of the Computing Industry, Hacker culture was the norm of the day), meaning that essentially, programmers would create new programs and pass it on to others to improve and pass on further. Thereby, knowledge was shared, programs were shared and a culture of cooperation and innovation ensued. This was the 'Hacker Culture'. This lasted from the beginning of Computing until mid 70s.
But then the greedy few businesses decided that there was really no value in passing on the programs for free to others. In fact, they decided to milk their software offerings as a means of generating revenue. So they started charging, binding the users and other programmers in cryptic and restrictive licenses. This was the origin of Software Licensing practice. Soon this caught on with the Commercialization of Software programs in the mid 70s and numerous Proprietary Software vendors arose--IBM, Microsoft, Apple to name afew. Those who had not considered this practice, also joined in. Those who did not agree with this philosophy or could not keep up with this rampant practice either went out of business or went out of Computing Industry altogether --like Xerox. Others were newly proprietary vendors like AT&T, where the Unix Operating system was born. When AT&T started charging for their version of Unix, some programmers like in Berkeley University, formed their own Unix variant called - Berkeley System Distribution or BSD Unix. Over time, both AT&T Unix and BSD Unix gave rise to many other variants or flavors of Unix, throughout the latter half of 70s and 80s.
Still what was remaining of the erstwhile Hackers, most notably around Richard Stallman, organized themselves and created Free software Foundation in 1983. The goal of FSF was to create a totally new Operating System which looked and felt like Unix but was entirely based on non proprietary software. They released their software under the GNU GPL (GNU General Public License). GNU being a pun on Unix and stands for 'GNU is Not Unix'--a recursive acronym. Over the years, the GNU philosophy has led to a great transformation in the Computing Industry and reviving the Hacker culture. The success of Linux OS (actually GNU Linux, since it is based on the GNU GPL), Apache, Perl, Mozilla, Android etc in todays world is a proof that Freedom is valued in the Computing industry.