The GNU project (started in 1984) aims to create software which you can freely download, use and - if you need this - modify. This software is placed under the GPL - the Gnu Public License - which protects its freedom.

The GNU project convinced many programmers and companies of the advantages to distrubute or access the source code of software. Today many projects within all domaines (industrie, administration, education, science, art) based upon the same idea - not neccessarily related to the GNU project - are published as "Open-Source" projects:

A mayor difference between proprietairy software and "Open-Source" is the fact that the later is quickly ported from its initial developper's operating system to other operating systems which leads to "Multi-platform" solutions generally for the well known platforms , Mac-OS, MS-Windows, GNU-Linux and frequently for other systems of the "Unix-family". This gives the freedom of choice to the end user and assures a constraintless future to the solution.