"Few people had access to computers back when Richard Matthew Stallman realized the then-nascent software industry was adopting a business model based on denying software users their four essential freedoms, and that he could do something about it.

"A working group has been set up in January 7th, 2002 by APRIL and FSF France. The original idea is from Pierre Jarillon (ABUL president). The objective is to have Free Software classified as an intangible world cultural heritage by the UNESCO

"Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the initial announcement of the GNU Project, a pioneering initiative to develop an operating system that gives all users the freedom to modify it and publish modified versions, individually or working together.

The Free Software Foundation has defined Four Freedoms related to software. These freedoms apply to users of software, not necessarily developers. In the view of the FSF, these freedoms are ethical in nature, so much so that they argue that software which violates these freedoms is unethical.

"This article is about free software as used in the sociopolitical free software movement...Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that end users have the same freedoms as the original authors..."

"In this article, I explain how Smalltalk is since 30 years a practical social implementation of the freedom #3 and #4 of the Free Software philosophy: freedom to study, to modify and to redistribute a software..."

Whether you are online or offline, freedom matters. Like good health you never think about it or miss it until it is under threat or actually gone. If you love freedom, you probably love free software and it has given us some terrific tools with which to defend freedom.

RMS: «When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes [...] As the advocates of open source draw new users into our community, we free software activists have to work even more to bring the issue of freedom to those new users' attention.

"...The GNU Free Documentation License is a clever piece of work: rather than using copyright law to prohibit you from using works released under it, it uses copyright law to guarantee that you will always be free to use, modify, redistribute and study works released under it.