Free Software Foundation

body (FSF) An organisation devoted to the creation and

dissemination of free software, i.e. software that is free

from licensing fees or restrictions on use. The Foundation's

main work is supporting the GNU project, started by RichardStallman (RMS), partly to proselytise for his position that

information is community property and all software source

should be shared.

The GNU project has developed the GNU Emacs editor and a C

compiler, gcc, replacements for many Unix utilities and many

other tools. A complete Unix-like operating system (HURD)

is in the works (April 1994).

Software is distributed under the terms of the GNU GeneralPublic License, which also provides a good summary of the

Foundation's goals and principles. The Free Software

Foundation raises most of its funds from distributing its

software, although it is a charity rather than a company.

Although the software is freely available (e.g. by FTP - see

below) users are encouraged to support the work of the FSF by

paying for their distribution service or by making donations.

One of the slogans of the FSF is "Help stamp out software

hoarding!" This remains controversial because authors want to

own, assign and sell the results of their labour. However,

many hackers who disagree with RMS have nevertheless

cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality software

for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation's

imprimatur.

See copyleft, General Public Virus, GNU archive site.

.

Unofficial WWW pages: PDX, DeLorie.

E-mail: [email protected].

Address: Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Massachusetts

Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Telephone: [phone].

(1995-12-10)