-Copyright (C) 1985, 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+Copyright (C) 1985, 1993, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
+ 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
of this document, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and
Footnotes added in 1993 help clarify these points.
For up-to-date information about the available GNU software,
- please see the latest issue of the GNU's Bulletin. The list is
- much too long to include here.
+ please see www.gnu.org. For software tasks to work on, see
+ http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tasklist. For other ways
+ to contribute, see http://www.gnu.org/help.
What's GNU? Gnu's Not Unix!
============================
other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more
difficult.
- People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights
+ People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights(6)
carefully (such as lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to
intellectual property. The kinds of supposed intellectual property
rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts of
The sale of teaching, hand-holding and maintenance services could
also employ programmers.
- People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking
+ People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware(7), asking
for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services.
I have met people who are already working this way successfully.
(3) Several such companies now exist.
- (4) The Free Software Foundation raises most of its funds from a
-distribution service, although it is a charity rather than a company.
-If *no one* chooses to obtain copies by ordering from the FSF, it
-will be unable to do its work. But this does not mean that proprietary
-restrictions are justified to force every user to pay. If a small
-fraction of all the users order copies from the FSF, that is sufficient
-to keep the FSF afloat. So we ask users to choose to support us in
-this way. Have you done your part?
-
- (5) A group of computer companies recently pooled funds to support
-maintenance of the GNU C Compiler.
-
+ (4) The Free Software Foundation raised most of its funds for 10
+years from a distribution service, although it is a charity rather
+than a company.
+
+ (5) A group of computer companies pooled funds around 1991 to
+support maintenance of the GNU C Compiler.
+
+ (6) In the 80s I had not yet realized how confusing it was to speak
+of "the issue" of "intellectual property". That term is obviously
+biased; more subtle is the fact that it lumps together various
+disparate laws which raise very different issues. Nowadays I urge
+people to reject the term "intellectual property" entirely, lest it
+lead others to suppose that those laws form one coherent issue. The way to be
+clear is to discuss patents, copyrights, and trademarks separately.
+See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml for more explanation
+of how this term spreads confusion and bias.
+
+ (7) Subsequently we have learned to distinguish between "free
+software" and "freeware". The term "freeware" means software you are
+free to redistribute, but usually you are not free to study and change
+the source code, so most of it is not free software. See
+http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html for more
+explanation.