Many of these problems are with volunteer software in general, not Free Software in particular. Hobbyist proprietary programs are often hard to use for many of the same reasons. But the easiest way of getting volunteers to contribute to a program is to make it open source. And while thousands of people are now employed in developing Free Software, most of its developers are volunteers.

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.

Ubuntu Software Center is something we all overlooked for long. Even while writing tutorials about installing different applications in this blog, I prefer to provide command line instructions only. But a lot of Ubuntu users are new comers and Software Center means a lot to them.

“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 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".

"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.

"..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.

"Please join us on Wednesday evening, for a presentation by James Vasile of the Free Software Law Center on several legal topics of interest to users of Free and Open Source Software.

"...SELF aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community."