HPR0933: Freedom is not Free 1 Introduction

Richard Stallman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

Richard Stallman, Free Software foundation

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often shortened to rms, is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and he has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and various tools in the GNU coreutils. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

The Free Software Definition

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Free as in Freedom

Free as in Freedom oggcast - https://faif.us
Free as in Freedom is a bi-weekly oggcast, hosted and presented by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler. The discussion includes legal, policy, and many other issues in the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) world. Occasionally, guests join Bradley and Karen to discuss various topics regarding FLOSS.
You can email feedback on the show to oggcast@faif.us, or join bkuhn and other listeners in our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net.

Free Software Foundation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA.
From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community. Consistent with its goals, only free software is used on FSF's computers.

How you can support free software

• Bug Reports
• Documentation
• Financial Support
• Advocacy

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