A message from president Geoffrey Knauth: Reflecting on the origins of software freedom
Humans have wondered about origins beyond memory, perhaps even before we had words. In our community of free software activists, the origin is GNU, a declaration of freedoms that must be guarded. The FSF is the firmament created to protect and develop the GNU Project, and, these days, other free software initiatives as well. Today, GNU is the gold standard of what free software should be: unambiguously devoted to your computing freedom and rigorously maintained to provide maximum power and extensibility to users. The purpose of GNU is also to inspire developers, to educate those who wish to code and create in the ultimate collaborative project.
These days, much of the world's computers have free software in it. Some people say, "We have won, we can relax." If only that were true. The same forces that wanted to take away your freedom are far more powerful today than they were forty years ago. People put their software where they think it will be safe, only to discover that some processes of corporatization and capitalization make those places less safe, less permanent, less owned by you and more an "asset" of a corporation that is not you. In the worst cases, your code that was free gets morphed into software that is ultimately not free.