The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated the GNU operating system, software development for which began in January 1984. The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software to get along without any software that is not free."To make this happen, the GNU Project began working on an operating system called GNU. GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for "GNU's Not Unix". This goal of making a free software operating system was achieved in 1992 when the last gap in the GNU system, a kernel, was filled by a third-party Unix-style kernel called "Linux" being released as Free Software, under a GNU GPL v2 license.Current work of the GNU Project includes software development, awareness building, and political campaigning.