FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT

The free software movement (abbreviated FSM) is a social movement which aims to promote
user’s rights to access and modify software. The alternative terms "software libre", "open
source", and "FOSS" are associated with the free software movement. Although drawing on traditions
and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture, Richard Stallman is widely
credited with launching the movement in 1983 by founding the GNU Project. Stallman founded
the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement.

The philosophy of the movement is to give freedom to computer users by replacing
proprietary software under restrictive licensing terms with free software, with the ultimate goal of
liberating everyone "in cyberspace" that is, every computer user. Members of the free software
movement believe that all users of software should have the freedoms listed in the free software
definition. Many hold that it is immoral to prohibit or prevent people from exercising these
freedoms and that these freedoms are required to create a decent society where software users can
help each other, and to have control over their computers.
Some adherents to the free software movement do not believe that proprietary software is
strictly immoral. They argue freedom is valuable (both socially and pragmatically) as a property of
software in its own right, separate from technical quality in a narrow sense. The Free Software
Foundation also believes all software needs free documentation (in particular because
conscientious programmers should be able to update manuals to reflect modification that they
made to the software), but deems the freedom to modify less important for other types of written
works. Within the free software movement, the Floss manuals foundation specializes on the goal
of providing such documentation.
Members of the free software movement advocate that works which serve a practical
purpose should also be free. The initial work of the free software movement focused on software
development. The free software movement also rejects proprietary software, refusing to install
software that does not give them the freedoms of free software. According to Stallman, "The only
thing in the software field that is worse than an unauthorized copy of a proprietary program, is an
authorized copy of the proprietary program because this does the same harm to its whole
community of users, and in addition, usually the developer, the perpetrator of this evil, profits from it."
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. Some users
believe that a compromise term encompassing both aspects is ideal, to promote both the user’s
freedom with the software and also to promote the perceived superiority of an open source
development model.