The Gnits Standards are a collection of standards and recommendations for programming, maintaining, and distributing software. They are published by a group of GNU project maintainers who call themselves "Gnits", which is short for "GNU Nit-pickers". As such, they represent advice, not Free Software Foundation or GNU policy, but parts of the Gnits' standards have seen widespread adoption among free software programmers in general. The Standards address aspects of software architecture, program behaviour, human–computer interaction, C programming, documentation, and software releases.