stephen fry, the “english humorist, writer, wit, actor, novelist, filmmaker and television presenter”, made a rather nice video for the occassion, entitled Freedom Fry — “Happy birthday to GNU” — see for yourself:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjFahtRxgd4

aside from mind-blowing software such as the GNU compiler tool chain, emacs, and lots and lots of other tools and programs, i personally think the GNU public license (GPL) is one of the most remarkable ideas that happened in software: basically it says

here is the software, here is the code, you can do with it what you want, but if you distribute it further you have to make the source available for free and if you make changes to the code you have to distribute those changes as source code for free as well

brilliant. as stephen fry puts it: that is the good science equivalent of software. we can use it, we can build on it, but so can you and you even have the right under the GPL to demand that we give you the source to our code if we distribute it ourselves.

happy birthday GNU!