Free software movement

Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture and academia, Richard Stallman formally founded the movement in 1983 by launching the GNU Project.

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often known by his initials, rms, and occasionally upper-case RMS, is an American free software movement activist and programmer.

Stallman later established the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement. Like many social movements, the free software movement has ongoing internal conflict between the many FOSS organizations (FSF, OSI, Debian, Mozilla Foundation, Apache Foundation etc.) and their personalities.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, which promotes the universal freedom to study, distribute, create, and modify computer software, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ("share alike") terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License.

Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture and academia, Richard Stallman formally founded the movement in 1983 by launching the GNU Project.

This and other developments such as the rise of the free software movement and community drew together a critically large population and encouraged the spread of a conscious, common, and systematic ethos.

In practice, this means rejecting "proprietary software", which imposes such restrictions, and promoting free software, with the ultimate goal of liberating everyone in cyberspace – that is, every computer user.

Although the term "free software" had already been used loosely in the past, Richard Stallman is credited with tying it to the sense under discussion and starting the free-software movement in 1983, when he launched the GNU Project: a collaborative effort to create a freedom-respecting operating system, and to revive the spirit of cooperation once prevalent among hackers during the early days of computing.

After this, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to promote the term "open source software" as an alternative term for free software.

Bruce Perens (born around 1958 ) is an American venture capitalist, computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement.

Members of the free software movement believe that all users of software should have the freedoms listed in The Free Software Definition.

Despite the philosophical differences between the free-software movement and the open-source-software movement, the official definitions of free software by the FSF and of open-source software by the OSI basically refer to the same software licences, with a few minor exceptions.

A lot of lobbying work has been done against software patents and expansions of copyright law.

There is strong dislike in the free software community towards software patents.

Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture and academia, Richard Stallman formally founded the movement in 1983 by launching the GNU Project.

Software development from that point on focused on maintaining existing projects, and starting new projects only when there was an acute threat to the free software community.

Some free software advocates use the term free and open-source software (FOSS) as an inclusive compromise, drawing on both philosophies to bring both free software advocates and open-source software advocates together to work on projects with more cohesion.

The free-software movement and the open-source software movement are online social movements behind widespread production and adoption of FOSS.

After this, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to promote the term "open source software" as an alternative term for free software. Like many social movements, the free software movement has ongoing internal conflict between the many FOSS organizations (FSF, OSI, Debian, Mozilla Foundation, Apache Foundation etc.) and their personalities.

Both the modern free software movement and the Open Source Initiative were born from a common history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture, but their basic goals and philosophy differ.

Regarding the meaning and misunderstandings of the word free, those who work within the free software camp have searched for less ambiguous terms and analogies like "free beer vs free speech" in efforts to convey the intended semantics, so that there is no confusion concerning the profitability of free software.

The terms gratis and libre may be used to categorise intellectual property, particularly computer programs, according to the licenses and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities, as well as the broader free culture movement.

Congressmen Edgar David Villanueva and Jacques Rodrich Ackerman have been instrumental in introducing free software in Peru, with bill 1609 on "Free Software in Public Administration".

* Free software movement

In the GNU/Linux naming controversy the FSF argues for the term GNU/Linux because GNU is a longstanding project to develop a free operating system, of which they assert the kernel was the last missing piece.

Proponents call for the correction of the more extended term, on the grounds that it doesn't give credit to the major contributor and the associated free software philosophy.

In his 1998 article "The High-Tech Gift Economy," Richard Barbrook suggested that the then-nascent free software movement represented a return to the gift economy building on hobbyism and the absence of economic scarcity on the internet.

Prestige gained as a result of contributions to source code fosters a social network for the developer; the open source community will recognize the developer's accomplishments and intelligence.

Therefore, there was a strong controversy around the update of the GPLv2 to the GPLv3 in 2007, as the updated license is not compatible with the previous version.

Over the following 15 years, members of the free software community became concerned over problems in the GPLv2 license that could let someone exploit GPL-licensed software in ways contrary to the license's intent.

After this, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to promote the term "open source software" as an alternative term for free software.

Raymond has had a number of public disputes with other figures in the free software movement.

Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) is a national coalition of various regional and sectoral free software movements operating in different parts of India.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) was founded in 2001 to support all aspects of the free software movement in Europe.

The label "open source" was created and adopted by a group of people in the free-software movement at a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source-code release for Navigator.

The free-culture movement, with its ethos of free exchange of ideas, is aligned with the free and open-source-software movement, as well as other movements and philosophies such as open access (OA), the remix culture, the hacker culture, the access to knowledge movement, the copyleft movement and the public domain movement.

Like many social movements, the free software movement has ongoing internal conflict between the many FOSS organizations (FSF, OSI, Debian, Mozilla Foundation, Apache Foundation etc.) and their personalities.

The free software movement champions copyleft licensing schema (often pejoratively called "viral licenses").

Some have suggested that copyleft became a divisive issue in the ideological strife between the Open Source Initiative and the free-software movement.

After this, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to promote the term "open source software" as an alternative term for free software.

The free software community in some parts of India sometimes uses the term "Swatantra software" since the term "Swatantra" means free in Sanskrit, which is the ancestor of all Indo-European Languages of India, including Hindi, despite English being the lingua franca.

It is held in high regard within the free software movement as a fundamental philosophical source.