Free Software Movement

The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture, Richard Stallman formally founded the movement in 1983 by launching the GNU Project.

The free software philosophy at the core of the movement drew on the essence and incidental elements of what was called hacker culture by many computer users in the 1970s, among other sources.

Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement.

Read more about Free Software Movement:  Philosophy, Legislation, Subgroups and Schisms, Measures of Progress

Famous quotes containing the words free and/or movement:

    We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance.
    Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)

    Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis—German National Socialism.
    Hermann Goering (1893–1946)