Gcc is one of many useful tools developed by the GNU (short for GNU’s Not Unix) project. The GNU project is a tax-exempt charity started by Richard Stallman in 1984, with the ambitious goal of developing a complete Unix-like system whose source code is unencumbered by restrictions on how it can be modified or distributed. The GNU project has developed an environment with all the major components of a Unix operating system, except for the kernel, which was developed separately by the Linux project. The GNU environment includes the emacs editor, gcc compiler, gdb debugger, assembler, linker, utilities for manipulating binaries, and other components. The gcc compiler has grown to support many different languages, with the ability to generate code for many different machines. Supported languages include C, C++, Fortran, Java, Pascal, Objective-C, and Ada.
The GNU project is a remarkable achievement, and yet it is often overlooked. The modern opensource movement (commonly associated with Linux) owes its intellectual origins to the GNU project’s notion of free software (“free” as in “free speech,” not “free beer”). Further, Linux owes much of its popularity to the GNU tools, which provide the environment for the Linux kernel.