"Defenselessness is not the American Way. In the land of the free and the brave, developers defend their freedom with the GNU General Public License [...] The Free Software Movement was founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideals of 1776: freedom, community, and voluntary cooperation. This is what leads to free enterprise, to free speech, and to free software. "

"Victor Yap of the Blender User Group of Singapore will be demonstrating Blender at the #mce_temp_url# this Saturday..." — Blender is the *free software* 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. —

"Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution.

I've talked so far about software freedom as in speech and as in beer. Today my topic is the kind of "free" that people view as a burden, the example being "free kittens." This is the meaning of "free" that keeps many regular, reasonable computer users from adopting (or perhaps even trying) free software solutions for everyday needs.

Free software is software you can study, modify and share without restriction. But unlike proprietary software, there is no big budget marketing campaign behind it. Rather, people discover it and come to value the freedom it provides. What are these people's motivations for working on free software? Why is community and sharing so important? Why should everyone be using free software?

It seems the author didn't understand the philosophy of free software. Free software is about freedom. Think free speech, not free beer. Feel free to explain it in comments... -- via http://linuxaucoin.blogspot.com/2008/04/free-software-festival-this-satu...

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --

"The annual free software conference LibrePlanet is the place for the free software community -- from old school hackers to brand new users -- to come together and further the collective goals of the free software movement.

The free software movement's most important license -- version three of the GNU General Public License was unveiled by the Free Software Foundation late last month. It comes roughly 16 years after its wildly successful predecessor, GPLv2, became one of the most used software licenses ever. Today, approximately three quarters of the world's free software packages are distributed under GPLv2.