Z:gnu-www-ja-free-digital-society--0d2911-In fact this was a tradition a/en

In fact this was a tradition at the time. The tradition was: if there was an existing program and you wrote something similar to it, inspired by it, you could give credit by giving your program a name that's a recursive acronym saying it's not the other one. So I gave credit to Unix for the technical ideas of Unix, but with the name GNU, because I decided to make GNU a Unix-like system, with the same commands, the same system calls, so that it would be compatible, so that people who used Unix could switch over easily.