Welcome to the GNU Forever Project!
The GNU Forever Project has been inspired by 3 sources. The first is Sir Terry Pratchett's 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal. The second is the X-Clacks Overhead project. The third is the Eve Online community. The fourth is Reddit, specifically the fan sub-reddits of r/Discworld & r/Eve.
Going Postal - the novel
On 25th September, 2004, Sir Terry Pratchett's 33rd novel Going Postal was released. It told the story of a conman given a second chance to become honest by taking over the operation & revitalisation of the Post Office,
the creation, theft (by an entirely different conman) & recovery of the clacks, a steam-punk version of the internet.
The relevant part of this is the clacks itself. Just as our most of the traffic on the internet is about the operation of the internet, so it is with the clacks.
A group of clacks operators wishing to pay tribute to one of their own devised a coded message to send on the clacks forever, keeping his name alive.
G: Send the message onto the next Clacks Tower.
N: Do not log the message.
U: At the end of the line, return the message.
X-Clacks-Overhead - the internet one
On 12th March, 2015 Sir Terry Pratchett died of "the embuggerance" (early onset Alzheimers Disease).
Being an extremely respected & techno-savvy author with a loyal fanbase of techno-savvy readers, it became almost inevitable that some of those readers would apply the GNU principle to the internet.
Thus, the X-Clacks-Overhead was born.
More info:
https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/
Eve Online
Yes, the team who developed this website play Eve Online. Yes, we know we're bad people.
But here's the thing: Eve Online players pay tribute to their fallen as well, in a ritual called "lighting a cyno". It's like lighting a candle, but with a virtual candle. So that's a factor here.
Reddit, r/Eve & r/Discworld
So, two groups of two fanbases both doing commemerative things for people the have lost which is great. Both groups can post a "GNU" or "o7" on Reddit, also great.
All we have done is taken the work of our predecessors & combined it.
Anyway, that's the story. If you want to know if a website you are accessing (including this one) implements the X-Clacks-Overhead, here's a list of download links.