Free Software Foundation exists thirty years

The Free Software Foundation has celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. On October 4, 1985, the non-profit organization was founded. Since then, the organization has been committed to ‘free’ software, whose source code is accessible to everyone.

This past weekend, the anniversary of the FSF was celebrated in Boston, United States. During the evening, with a hacker casual dress code, a talk was given by Richard Stallman, the programmer and software activist who founded the organization. Stallman is also the founder of the GNU Project and author of the GPL, the most widely used license in open source projects.

Part of the FSF is the Free Software Directory, a catalog of free software that can be used with free operating systems. The software in question is often free, but that’s not what the organization is about. The FSF promotes software whose users are free to modify, share, and redistribute the code. The organization aims to draw attention to free software through various campaigns.

According to John Sullivan, executive director of the FSF since 2011, smartphones and wearables are especially “terrifying” when it comes to freedom for users. In an interview with opensource.com at the beginning of this year, he spoke out against the restrictions that Apple applies. He denounced the fact that Apple does not allow users to install their own software on iOS devices.