This section has been initialy written by Hubert Tonneau, then reviewed and improved by John and Stephanie Eikenberry. The clear objective was to write a free clone of all softwares that had suddenly gone private and closed in the late 70s. This movement was boosted and reached its current major status due to the growth of the Internet that enabled efficient distant work. From my point of view they have only dealt with half of the problem.
Closed software is a big problem for many reasons.
First, the end user can not deeply customize and extend the software for their own needs, which prevents the good ideas of others from being integrated. Second, closed software tends to be unstable due to companies' limited manpower and the complex nature of the software. Finally, nothing prevents a company from selling immature software that isn't standards compliant. However, free software also leads to new problems, such as the lack of readability and extendibility. C. Up to now this has been a reasonable choice for operating systems, as C is primarily a kind of portable assembly, which is mainly what is needed for writing an operating system such as Linux.