Those words came from the one person who has zealously campaigned to safeguard software freedoms--Richard M. Stallman, a celebrated programmer and an accomplished hacker. (Contrary to popular belief, a hacker is not an anti-social being. S/he is someone who is passionate, even obsessive, about programming, as opposed to a cracker, someone who breaks security on a system, often with malicious intent.)
Stallman, then working at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, left to pursue the Free Software Movement in 1984, inspired by the ideals of American independence: freedom, community and voluntary co-operation, which leads to free enterprise, free speech and free software. He had already started the GNU project in 1983 to develop the free operating system GNU (a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix).
In 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs.The FSF promotes the development and use of free software and free documentation. In particular, FSF promotes the GNU operating system, used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant, based on the Linux kernel developed by Linus Torvalds. These systems are often mistakenly called just `Linux'; calling them `GNU/Linux' corrects this confusion.
The FSF (http://www.fsf.org/), whose headquarters is in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, is a tax-exempt charity for free software development. It raises funds by selling GNU CD-ROMs, T-shirts, manuals and deluxe distributions (all of which users are free to copy and change), as well as from donations.
The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software. The FSF believes that free software is a matter of freedom, not price.
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