"About the GNU Project" is stallman's authoritative retrospective account of the founding and development of the gnu-project, written for the 1999 O'Reilly anthology open-sources-book-1999 edited by tim-oreilly and others. It is the most comprehensive first-person account of the project's origins, goals, and political context available from stallman himself.
The essay opens with the mit-ai-lab period and the specific incident — the Xerox printer software and its locked source code — that crystallized stallman's thinking about software freedom. The xerox-printer-incident is recounted as the moment stallman first felt the full weight of what software restrictions meant: being unable to fix a problem that was right in front of him, being refused the information needed to fix it, and being asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would require keeping the secret from others. The essay treats this not as a minor frustration but as a formative ethical experience.
stallman then traces the deterioration of the mit-ai-lab hacker culture during mit-ai-lab-hacker-culture-1971-1984 and his decision to respond by launching the gnu-project with the gnu-initial-announcement in 1983. The essay explains the choice of Unix compatibility as a pragmatic decision: Unix was already widely used, and a compatible system would be immediately useful. GNU would be "Unix-compatible but not Unix."
A substantial portion of the essay is devoted to explaining what "free software" means and does not mean — the libre-vs-gratis distinction, the four-freedoms framework, and the reason the free-software-definition requires all four freedoms together. stallman is careful here to distinguish the free software position from the open source position that eric-raymond and bruce-perens had articulated the previous year at the open-source-definition-schism. The essay's publication in the same volume as open source advocates made this distinction pointed and visible.
The essay covers the development of copyleft as a legal strategy, the creation of the gpl-v1 and subsequent versions, and the founding-of-fsf. It also addresses the gnu-linux-naming controversy, insisting that the system commonly called "Linux" should properly be called "GNU/Linux" because the GNU components form the bulk of the operating system. This argument is developed at greater length in linux-and-gnu.
For readers approaching stallman's work for the first time, this essay is the most efficient single entry point: it covers the history, the philosophy, the legal strategy, and the ongoing political project in one document.