"People are ignorant, but we already know that. As usual, I’ve read something really stupid on Twitter this morning. It said: I hope Apple will develop for everyone [every OS]. I think it would be one of the worst things to ever happen. Why do people want to install non-free software on free systems?

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?

Software always has bugs, and free software is no exception to this. When we think of free software, we think of software we can distribute, modify, study and of course, run. I don't spend a lot of my time studying or modifying free software, to be honest. There are lot of people who do this, and they're a lot smarter than me... well, most of them. Apparently, none of the people who write free software bug trackers ever actually use them to report a bug, or if they do, they have a very high tolerance for pain and annoyance.

On February 14th, Valentine's Day, Free Software Foundation Europe asks all Free Software users to show their appreciation for Free Software. FSFE suggests to take this day as an opportunity to say "thank you" to one of the dedicated hard-working people in the Free Software community.

The Mozilla people have started producing free software builds of firefox; "compiled with branding, logos and talk-back removed."
Download from:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/2.0.0.9/contrib/free-software/
Builds aren't yet automated, so there's only en-US at the moment.

"..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.

"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.

When explaining why Free Software is important, one question that often comes up is: “do I really need the software freedom?”

Er, tell people it’s free as in freedom, and embrace the Free Software Movement ! (see the quote of Eben Moglen about Firefox and Free Software... http://www.geof.net/blog/2006/12/10/eben-moglen )

-- via the standblog http://standblog.org/blog/post/2008/01/03/Actu-Mozilla