In June 2001 after the first public release of MacOS X shipped (10.0). Archive founder Chris Roberts needed several GNU tools to continue working on several projects for his employer at the time (Franklin covey, Franklinplanner.com).. At this point in time little or no open source software packages had been made for Mac OS X. After spending approximately a week compiling some twenty tools including XFree86 it was apparent that there was a need for easy-to-use binary distributions of open source software.
A small archive of twenty packages was created and placed on Chris Roberts's family website. Within a week over a hundred thousand downloads had occurred pointing to a real need for an archive of free software. The archive grew to more than 10,000 software packages over the next nine months.
For a short period of time the archive produced CD distributions of its software packages to provide funds for distribution hardware bandwidth and domain registration fees.
OSXGNU is still committed to the average Mac User not the "unix geek" this is why most of the distributions on site are in apple package format.
It became apparent early on and that the package format that Apple had adopted originally was quite powerful but was missing several tools currently namely un-installation and dependency checking. These problems where the birth of The OSXPM project which has enjoyed a little over a hundred thousand downloads to date.
The archive is still maintained and operated by Chris Roberts and is mirrored in many countries.
In late 2003 it became apparent that the old Web-site was becoming too difficult to maintain. Thus a new and more easily maintained database driven site was conceived and implemented.
OSXGNU Has grown over the years and will continue to grow and evolve as Darwin and Mac OS X evolve.

You may always contact the maintainers of the archive by sending mail to librarian@osxgnu.org
or
sending snail-mail to: OSXGNU.ORG 267 W Amanda Lynn lane Midvale Utah USA 84047
Individual package maintainers may be reached via the form provided by clicking on the maintainers name in the package listing.
OSXGNU Is commited to maintaining the privacy of our users and maintainers no e-mail address will be released by OSXGNU to any commercial or private party.
This policy is not subject to change.