Free Software Foundation

From Saferpedia

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement which is a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF's headquarters is in Massachusetts, USA.

From the beginning until the mid 90s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid 90s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community.

Consistent with its goals, only free software is used on FSF's computers.

The FSF holds the copyrights on various essential pieces of the GNU system, such as GNU Compiler Collection. As copyright holder, it has exclusive authority to enforce the GNU General Public License (GPL) when copyright infringement occurs on that software. While other copyright holders of other software systems adopted the GPL as their license, FSF was the only organization to regularly assert its copyright interests on software so licensed until Harald Welte launched gpl-violations.org in 2004.

From 1991 until 2001, GPL enforcement was done informally, usually by Stallman himself, often with assistance from FSF's lawyer, Eben Moglen. Typically, GPL violations during this time were cleared up. Source: Wikipedia

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