The Free Software Foundation organizes the worldwide free software community. Among the millions of contributors and users in this community, there are many different opinions and approaches; our focus is on the philosophical and political work needed to maintain the freedom to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute software. This covers issues of software patents, proprietary licensing, and government legislation. We also organize and provide support for the GNU Project, which is a community of developers writing and maintaining the GNU free software operating system.

Our main objective is to achieve software freedom for everyone. The FSF is dedicated to promoting computer users’ rights to use, copy, study, modify, and redistribute computer programs. We promote the development and use of free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant, and free documentation. FSF and GNU websites and discussion mailing lists are places where people can come to coordinate their efforts toward these goals. All of these efforts improve the ability of people to share knowledge with each other and build communities around that knowledge.

The FSF itself is based in the United States, but the free software movement we organize is truly international. Around 30 percent of FSF donating associate members live outside the United States. Free software development today is global; the version of GNU/Linux that we recommend is developed in Argentina. Free software usage today is also global. GNU/Linux is used in cluster supercomputers and in cheap computers for the masses, used to run much of the Internet, used for advanced research, used by the World Social Forum and by large brokerage companies, and used in the Telecenters of São Paulo that provide computer access to poor neighborhoods. It has been adopted for state schools in parts of Spain and India.

FSF’s founder, Richard Stallman, had participated in the cooperating community of the 70s while working at MIT. When this community collapsed under pressure for commercialization, he decided to build a new community of cooperation. However, with the proprietary software that had become the norm in the 80s, cooperation was illegal or impossible. To redistribute the software verbatim is illegal; to improve it without a copy of the source code is impossible. Having a community would require replacing that proprietary software with “free software”—software that users are free to change and redistribute (and run). So Stallman set out to develop a free software operating system, called GNU. Most operating systems are developed for technical or commercial reasons; GNU is the only operating system ever developed specifically for the sake of giving computer users the freedom to cooperate.

Development of GNU started in January 1984. The FSF was founded in October 1985 to raise funds for GNU development, and for promoting users’ freedom to share and change software. Over the years, thousands of developers on several continents have joined in developing GNU. As part of developing GNU, we also developed the concept of “copyleft”, a way of using copyright law to defend everyone’s freedom instead of to take it away. This is implemented in the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), whose first version was released in January 1989.

In 1992, the kernel Linux was released as free software under the GNU GPL. As GNU was then missing only a kernel, GNU and Linux together made a complete operating system, which now has tens of millions of users. This was an early example of a new form of growth: other projects developing software and releasing it as free software, inspired by the community that we built.