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 ...