"Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded.

"..RMS’s other mission here is to promote the Free Software Movement. The creator of the GPL...is at pains to correct misunderstandings of what the term free software means and to draw a distinction between it and the open source movement.

Many of us know that governments can threaten the human rights of software users through censorship and surveillance of the Internet. Many do not realize that the software they run on their home or work computers can be an even worse threat. Thinking of software as `just a tool', they suppose that it obeys them, when in fact it often obeys others instead.

"Today we have what we didn't have 20 years ago - powerful enemies," Stallman said. Large companies have the means and motivation to lobby Congress and devise laws to prohibit the free distribution of software, he said.

" The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom.

The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.

The wide variety of useful, free software programs that are now available is made possible by the contributions of thousands of volunteers from around the world. While many of these free programs are created to replace proprietary programs or to solve a developer's particular needs, each and every free program can be part of a greater goal -- the creation of a fully free software environment.

RMS: Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good.

The site includes more than 6,500 free and open source software (FOSS) programs for users to download, run and share. According to the FSF, each entry in the Directory is individually checked and tested so that users can be assured that any program they find there "will be free software with free documentation and without proprietary software requirements".