It was founded by Richard M. Stallman, the author of the original Emacs editor. GNU Emacs is the most widely used version of Emacs today.
The GNU project is an on-going effort on the part of the Free Software Foundation to create a complete, freely distributable, POSIX compliant computing environment. (GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix".) The FSF uses the "GNU General Public License" (or GPL) to ensure that source code for their software is always available to the end user. A copy of the GPL is included for your reference (see section GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE). The GPL applies to the C language source code for gawk.
As of this writing (1995), the only major component of the GNU environment still uncompleted is the operating system kernel, and work proceeds apace on that. A shell, an editor (Emacs), highly portable optimizing C, C++, and Objective-C compilers, a symbolic debugger, and dozens of large and small utilities (such as gawk), have all been completed and are freely available.
Until the GNU operating system is released, the FSF recommends the use of Linux, a freely distributable, Unix-like operating system for 80386 and other systems. There are many books on Linux. One freely available one is Linux Installation and Getting Started, by Matt Welsh. Many Linux distributions are available, often in computer stores or bundled on CD-ROM with books about Linux. Also, the FSF provides a Linux distribution ("Debian"); contact them for more information. See section Getting the gawk Distribution, for the FSF's contact information. (There are two other freely available, Unix-like operating systems for 80386 and other systems, NetBSD and FreeBSD. Both are based on the 4.4-Lite Berkeley Software Distribution, and both use recent versions of gawk for their versions of awk.)
This book you are reading now is actually free. The information in it is freely available to anyone, the machine readable source code for the book comes with gawk, and anyone may take this book to a copying machine and make as many copies of it as they like. (Take a moment to check the copying permissions on the Copyright page.)
If you paid money for this book, what you actually paid for was the book's nice printing and binding, and the publisher's associated costs to produce it. We have made an effort to keep these costs reasonable; most people would prefer a bound book to over 300 pages of photo-copied text that would then have to be held in a loose-leaf binder (not to mention the time and labor involved in doing the copying). The same is true of producing this book from the machine readable source; the retail price is only slightly more than the cost per page of printing it on a laser printer.
This book itself has gone through several previous, preliminary editions. I started working on a preliminary draft of The GAWK Manual, by Diane Close, Paul Rubin, and Richard Stallman in the fall of 1988. It was around
