Showing posts with label FSF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FSF. Show all posts

Monday, June 20, 2011

John Sullivan, Executive Director


John started working with GNU Press and the Free Software Foundation in 2003 and then became the FSF's first Campaigns Manager, working on outreach efforts like Defective by Design, BadVista, and PlayOgg. In 2011, John became the Executive Director after four years as Manager of Operations.

His background is mainly in the humanities, with an MFA in Writing and Poetics and a BA in Philosophy, but he has been spending too much time with computers and online communities since the days of the Commodore 64. He's become a dedicated GNU Emacs user after first trying it around 1996, and contributes code to several of its extensions.

Prior to the FSF, John worked as a college debate team instructor for both Harvard and Michigan State University.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Free Software

Free Software Movement was started by Richard M Stallman founder of GNU Project. GNU is recursive acronym of GNU is Not Unix.

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Free as in Freedom. This statement is very confusing because when talking about free software, it is best to avoid using terms like give away or for free, because those terms imply that the issue is about price, not freedom.

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. It's diferent from open source.

References :
1. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
2. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
3. http://opensource.org/docs/osd
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement