GNU Project some is released under a weak copyleft or a lax, push-over free software license. The first goal of the GNU project was to create a whole free-software operating system. By 1992, the GNU project had completed all of the major operating system utilities, but had not completed their proposed operating system kernel, GNU Hurd. With the release of the Linux kernel, started independently by Linus Torvalds in 1991, and released under the GPL with version 0.12 in 1992, for the first time it was possible to run an operating system composed completely of free software. Though the Linux kernel is
EPOC (operating system) system to drive their next generation of devices. First, however, they needed to engineer a 16-bit single-board computer—something that was extremely difficult at the time. They codenamed the project "SIBO", for "single-board organiser" or "sixteen-bit organiser". To develop the SIBO hardware and software, they needed samples of the 16-bit microprocessors they would be programming; but it took more than a year to secure the chips, which caused a significant delay. By 1987, development of EPOC was underway: It was a single-user, preemptive multitasking operating system designed to run in read-only memory (ROM). The operating system and its programmes were written