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Goals of GNUWin
History of GNUWin
Links to similar projects
Goals of GNUWin
- Offer a collection of Free Software that might prove valuable for studies at the EPFL (and also to provide us an easy answer to questions such as "Don't you by any chance happen to have LaTeX/Emacs/gcc for Windows ?")
- Demonstrate the power of Free Software on MS-Windows
- Promote the work of the Free Software developers
- And, last but not least, ease the migration from Windows to a free operating system (such as GNU/Linux or BSD) by getting the user familiar with applications that are ubiquitous in their new environment; thus, only a few details about the environment itself need to be learned to complete the transition
GNUWin is only a selection of Free Software; GNUWin does not pretend nor want to be a complete repository for all Free Software. Our idea is to suggest some free Software that might prove useful and would allow people to discover Free Software, in the hope that interested people would eventually seek out other open source programs which fulfill their needs, and someday switch to a free operating system such as GNU/Linux.
History of GNUWin
Members of GNU Generation were often asked whether this or that piece
of Free Software also existed for Windows. We used to burn CDs on demand, mostly
with programs like LaTeX, emacs or gcc.
Then a member of GNU Generation had the idea to compile a whole CD full of Free Software for Windows. So the first version of GNUWin was created during the summer of 2001.
In September 2001 the bookshop "librairie Ellipse" sponsored the pressing of 500 CDs.
These CD were given away at no cost to anybody who might need them. Most of the CDs were given to students or staff of EPFL.
Once the 500 CDs were gone, we burned them on demand for sFr. 5.-. We even got orders from France, where we asked 5 Euros for the costs of copying, shipping and handling.
Due to this success of GNUWin 1 and the encouragements and criticisms we received, we decided to do it again: GNUWin II was born.
GNUWin II was meant to have a much better interface and multiple language support. And we can proudly say: We did it!
To conceive GNUWin II a webinterface was developed, so that everybody could work on it at the same time and modify or enhance the work of the others.
This also permits us to open the project to the world, so that everybody can modify and enhance GNUWin II in the spirit of Free Software.
Links to similar projects
GNUWin is not the only project that assembles Free Software for Windows:
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