The Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman's work represents the most important work for freedom that this culture, the American culture, has seen in many many generations because it takes the ideas of freedom and it removes it from the ivory tower, and it removes it from lawyers, and places it in a community -- a technology community -- that is one of the most important communities definin

" The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom.

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.

"...OpenFest is an idea for a celebration, which should exceed the boundaries set by differences and morals. Let there be a day each year in which we, the upholders of free software all over the world try to make this a day when all people could get in touch with the freedom on the Internet, with the freedom of open source software, with free software..."

In the beginning was... hacker culture and free Internet software. They existed as outsiders. They were really known by few. But some knew of them and an idea started to grow... it was first only in one person's mind, then two, then it spread to the hacker culture and further into the business world.

Open Source is not about freedom, nor is it about licenses. It's about community. Of course everyone knows about Richard Stallman's concern about having the freedom to modify all software on his machine. Tim O'Reilly has had a concern for many years that Open Source licenses do not keep software Open Source when it is not being distributed but instead performed as in Web 2.0 applications.

There is both a perceptual and an actual channel of openness in software. Users value the freedom of mobility as very close to what coders value as the freedom of source code access. The only reason there is a real gap here is that closed source systems, like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., don't actually allow you freedom of movement. It merely feels like that because the application is free and, fiscally speaking, the barrier for entry or exit is zero.

"... «I ask you to please always call it Free Software because that way you will encourage other people to pay attention to the question of freedom. The term Open Source was formulated by people who did not want to talk about freedom and that is the stupidest thing any people can do.

"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. We have to say, “It's free software and it gives you freedom!”—more and louder than ever."