Free Software Foundation

What Does Free Software Foundation Mean?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit organization that promotes the creation, distribution and amendment of free software programs and applications without any restriction.

FSF was founded by Richard Stallman in 1985 as part of the free software movement and the earlier GNU Project.

Techopedia Explains Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation was established to encourage the development of free software. The free software movement, which liberated users to freely create and share their software and programs, was a major driver behind this foundation. FSF’s primary objective is to instigate the rejection of propriety software that cannot be shared, published or altered legally.

FSF also maintains a team of in-house software programmers that develop software and applications that can be revised and distributed by end users, and are available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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