"..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.

Richard M. Stallman is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system; he initiated the Free Software Movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.

"Defenselessness is not the American Way. In the land of the free and the brave, developers defend their freedom with the GNU General Public License [...] The Free Software Movement was founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideals of 1776: freedom, community, and voluntary cooperation. This is what leads to free enterprise, to free speech, and to free software. "

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.

"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: «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.

“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 annual free software conference LibrePlanet is the place for the free software community -- from old school hackers to brand new users -- to come together and further the collective goals of the free software movement.

"As the founder of the free software movement and author of the GNU General Public License, I am writing to correct a misleading characterisation of free software presented in William Venema's article about open source. National Law Journal, Oct. 20. I do not wish to defend open source, which I have never supported.