The GNU Radio applications themselves are generally known as "flowgraphs", which are a series of signal processing blocks connected together, thus describing a data flow.

It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), and most of the project code is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation.

Philanthropist John Gilmore initiated GNU Radio with the funding of $320,000 (US) to Eric Blossom for code creation and project-management duties.

The GNU Radio software began as a fork of the Pspectra code that was developed by the SpectrumWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In March 2016, Tom Rondeau stepped down and was replaced by Ben Hilburn as the Project Lead, and Johnathan Corgan, a long-time maintainer, as the Chief Architect.

[8] In September 2020, GNU Radio became part of the SETI Institute (a non-profit, multi-disciplinary research and education organization) for all financial and contractual purposes.

GRC was developed by Josh Blum during his studies at Johns Hopkins University (2006–2007), then distributed as free software for the October 2009 Hackfest.