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2.1 Referring to Proprietary Programs

See Reading Non-Free Code.

GNU should nevertheless keep an eye on what is going on around. In general, the GNU project refuses to endorse the use or development or distribution of non-free software. We don't do anything to encourage use of non-free software. However, this does not mean we don't care about the languages and data formats used by non-free software. Interoperation with popular non-free software is an important design goal for GNU software. In general, when a non-free program is more popular than the GNU software, it is very important to make the GNU software interoperate with the non-free program, so that people who already use it can more easily switch to GNU. This is the reason why the GNU system as a whole is upward-compatible with Unix (letter from Richard, 1996-06-14).