Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU System

Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit organisation which develops Free Software’s and advocates the software freedoms and software user right. It is a community of ethical programmers who have contributed their time and effort so that rest of the society can enjoy the freedom software has to offer (Brown, 2010). Free software gives users the freedom and benefits that proprietary software doesn’t (Lee, 2010). The term free in Free Software refers to liberty (like ‘Libre’ in French), and not the cost like free as in free speech and not free as in free beer. The freedoms are to make changes or hire someone else to make changes to meet the unique needs, to redistribute copies, to share with other people, and to make improvements and publish them so that other people can enjoy the benefit too. Free Software provides the users with four essential freedom: Freedom 0 which gives the user freedom to run the software for any purpose, Freedom 1 which gives the user freedom to view the source code so that the user can know how the program works and change it, Freedom 2 which gives the user freedom to redistribute copies of the software, Freedom 3 which gives the user freedom to distribute copies of the modified versions of software to others so that the whole community benefits from it (Revolution OS, 2002; Free Software Foundation, 2010).

If the source code is available without any restriction, then anyone can copy and modify it, then compile the program and distribute the software as proprietary software. In order to prevent this, Free software have some license like copyleft which state that while enjoying Freedom 3, one cannot add restriction so that other users get the same freedom (Free Software Foundation, 2010). 

The Free Software also gives the advantage for commercialization and there is a free market there for any kind of service or support people offer. When a company/business is using a Free Software they can go to anyone who offers them service and support and if they are not satisfied with it, they can move on to someone else who provides it. But with the proprietary software this freedom does not exist and the business just has to depend on the company who made it. Company specialised in Free Software started to evolve after the foundation of FSF. Cygnus was the first company who specialised in the Free Software (Revolution OS, 2002). 

The GNU project made C compiler, debugger, text editor and other software’s and was building a kernel. At the same time Linus Torvald from the University of Helsinki in Finland was building a kernel himself and later on released it independently under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Some people had a hand in this kernel and realised that that they could put together some pieces with the kernel to make a whole system. The GNU had developed everything except for the kernel, so people fitted Linux kernel into the gap in the GNU system which gave birth to the GNU/Linux Operating System (Revolution OS, 2002; Williams, 2002).

REFERENCES
http://pravab.blogspot.com/2011/09/references.html


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