![]() In 1984 we launched the development of the free operating system GNU, so we could avoid the non-free operating systems that deny freedom to their users. The free software movement has campaigned for computer users' freedom since 1983. But most of these users have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because today this system and community are more often described as “open source,” and attributed to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned. Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software the schools of regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. In a world of digital sounds, images and words, free software comes increasingly to equate with freedom in general. They become even more important as more and more of our culture and life activities are digitized. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but because they promote social solidarity-that is, sharing and cooperation. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. ![]() By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”-in a practical sense only. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. Open source is a development methodology free software is a social movement. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Nearly all open source software is free software the two terms describe almost the same category of software. "Open Source" is attributed to a different philosophy from "Free Software". ![]()
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