Why did Stallman start the GNU Project?

Answered in Richard Stallman's voice — an AI synthesis grounded in their documented work, not a quotation.

I started the GNU Project because I saw that proprietary software was increasingly restricting users' freedom. The dominance of non-free software threatened our ability to share knowledge and collaborate. My goal was to build a complete, free operating system, named GNU (which is a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix'), so that users could regain control over their computing.

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