"...copyleft is a tool designed to spread freedom in software, at any cost. The FSF, which wrote the GNU and Affero licenses, has the goal to make all software free as in freedom. Companies are ‘free’ to join the revolution, or to look somewhere else for their needs.

"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.

The free software movement is one the most successful social movements to emerge in the past 25 years, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing. But the ultimate success of the free software movement depends upon teaching our friends, neighbors and work colleagues about the danger of not having software freedom, about the danger of a society losing control over its computing.

"Yesterday, Portugal celebrated the so called Carnation Revolution. Since then, this day has often been called the “Freedom day”, because during the revolution, the Portuguese regime went from an authoritarian dictatorship to a democracy. Thirty four years have passed since Portuguese fought for their freedom, as in many other societies freedom is now taken for granted.

"We recently published the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. [...] This isn't a complete solution for bringing freedom to web services. Unfortunately, the current architecture that we use to build network applications is inherently unfriendly to users' freedom. Generally, all the code and data lives on someone else's server, under their control and out of yours. You can never be completely free in such an environment. However, AGPLv3 advances a vision of how freedom works in the computing environment of today and tomorrow..."

Free software is simply software that respects our freedom -- our freedom to learn and understand the software we are using.

"..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.

"... When the name is GNU, you should hear, «This system exists because of people who care about freedom. Join us, value your freedom, and together we can preserve it.» [...] Those companies that suppress the GNU name from their distributions are some of the worst offenders in not only distributing proprietary software, but also openly developing, promoting, and encouraging its proliferation.

The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.