Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a movement which tries to promote the universal freedom to distribute and modify computer software without restriction. The FSF was started in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States of America.
From its founding (when it started) until the 1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community.
GPL enforcement
The FSF holds the copyrights on many important pieces of the GNU system, such as the GCC. As a copyright holder, it has the power to enforce the GNU General Public License (GPL) when copyright infringement occurs on that software. While other copyright holders of other software systems used the GPL as their license, FSF was the only organization to regularly assert its copyright interests on software licensed under the GPL until Harald Welte created gpl-violations.org in 2004.
In late 2001, Bradley M. Kuhn (then Executive Director), with the help of Moglen, David Turner, and Peter T. Brown, turned these efforts into FSF's GPL Compliance Labs. From 2002-2004, high profile GPL enforcement cases, such as those against Linksys and OpenTV, became frequent. GPL enforcement and educational campaigns on GPL compliance was a major focus of the FSF's efforts during this period.
SCO lawsuit
In March 2003, SCO filed suit against IBM alleging(saying) that IBM's contributions to some free software, including FSF's GNU, violated SCO's rights. While FSF was never a party to the lawsuit, FSF was subpoenaed on November 5, 2003. During 2003 and 2004, FSF put a lot of advocacy effort into responding to the lawsuit and removing its negative impact on the adoption and promotion of free software.
Current and ongoing activities
The GNU project The original purpose of the FSF was to promote the ideals of free software. The organization created the GNU operating system as an example of this.
GNU licenses The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a popular license for free software projects. The current version (version 3) was released in June 2007. The FSF has also published the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), and the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).
GNU Press The FSF's publishing department, responsible for "publishing affordable books on computer science using freely distributable licenses."
The Free Software Directory This is a listing of software packages which are free software. Each package entry contains 47 pieces of information such as the project's homepage, developers and programming language.
Maintaining the Free Software Definition FSF maintains many of the documents that define the free software movement.
Project Hosting FSF hosts software development projects on their Savannah website.
Campaigns FSF sponsors a number of campaigns against what it thinks as dangers to software freedom, including software patents, digital rights management (which the FSF has called "digital restrictions management", as part of their effort to highlight their view that such technologies are "designed to take away and limit your rights,") and user interface copyright. Defective by Design is an FSF campaign against DRM. They also have a campaign to promote Ogg+Vorbis, a free alternative to proprietary formats like MP3 and AAC. They sponsor also some free software projects that are deemed to be "high-priority".
Annual awards "Award for the Advancement of Free Software" and "Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit".
High priority projects
The FSF maintains a list of "high priority projects" where the Foundation says that "there is a vital need to draw the free software community's attention". The FSF says these projects are"important because computer users are continually being seduced into using non-free software, because there is no adequate free replacement."
Recognition
1999: Linus Torvalds Award for Open Source Computing
2005: Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in the category of "Digital Communities"
Sister organizations
Free Software Foundation Europe, founded in 2001
Free Software Foundation India, founded in 2003
Free Software Foundation Latin America, founded in 2005
References
Other websites
Free Software Foundation
1985 establishments in the United States
Non-profit organizations of the United States
Intellectual property law
Boston
Free and open-source software organizations
1980s establishments in Massachusetts