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.

"Software licenses and patents aren't the only ways proprietary software vendors can restrict the freedoms of computer users. A key component of our overall campaign for software freedom is making sure that the hardware we buy is not an obstacle to the exercise of our freedoms.

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.

I was reading an article about Freesoftware adoption and it noted that the freedoms afforded by the GNU Gpl were written largely for developers not end users. So I figured I would take a shot at positing the four freedoms to general users.

"Once software users freedoms are protected the methodology that we know as Open Source becomes possible and its advantages become apparent. But without the guiding principles of Free Software the neccessity and direction of Open Source cannot be accounted for. Open Source has no history or trajectory, it cannot account for itself or suggest which tasks are neccessary or important.

"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..."

« This is a response to A balance of freedoms. "Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn." - RMS ... » (Submitted by aboutblank on fsdaily.com - Free Software News)

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.

"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.