Essays and Articles
This page lists a series of articles describing the philosophy of the
free software movement, which is the motivation for our development of
the free software operating system GNU.
A list of the latest
published articles is also available.
We
also
keep a list of
Organizations
that Work for Freedom in
Computer Development and Electronic Communications.
About Free Software
Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use
software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs
from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and
gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily.
These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe
software users should be able to make use of them.
About the GNU Operating System
Licensing Free Software
Laws and Issues
Stallman's Law
Patents
- Giving the Software
Field Protection from Patents
- FSF's Position on W3
Consortium “Royalty-Free” Patent Policy
rewritten
- How to Protect the Right
to Write Software (whether it's free or not).
- In
Felten v. RIAA, scientists are asking a court to rule that the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does not prohibit them from
publishing their research.
- EFF
“Intellectual Property”: MPAA (Motion Picture Association of
America) DVD Cases Archive
- Patent
Reform Is Not Enough
- Saving Europe from
Software Patents
- Europe's
“unitary patent” could mean unlimited software patents
- Boycott Amazon!
- Amazon Boycott Success!, a
letter from Nat Friedman to Richard Stallman.
- Letter from RMS to Tim
O'Reilly in regard to a statement by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, on
the duration of software patents.
- Amazon's patent on a system
for placing a purchase order over the internet, with notes by Richard
Stallman.
- Sequential Innovation, Patents, and
Imitation is a paper that presents a mathematical model showing
how patents can impede progress in fields like software.
- Harm from the Hague.
- Opposing The European
Software Patent Directive, a slightly modified version of the
article originally published in
The Guardian of London, by Richard Stallman and Nick Hill.
-
Soft sell. Richard Stallman's comments on the defeat of the EU
software patenting directive. Published in The Guardian in 2005.
-
Patent absurdity, an article by Richard M. Stallman published in
The Guardian in 2005.
- Bill Gates
and Other Communists. An article by Richard Stallman published
in CNET News.com in 2005.
- The Anatomy of a
Trivial Patent, by Richard M. Stallman.
-
Fighting Software Patents - Singly and Together
- Software patents —
Obstacles to software development
-
Software Patents and Literary Patents, by Richard M. Stallman.
Speaking of patenting artistic techniques, US patent (6,935,954)
covers making game characters start to hallucinate when (according to
the game) they are being driven insane. That is getting pretty close
to the hypothetical examples cited in this article.
- Why there are no GIF files on GNU web
pages. While this story is a historical illustration of the danger of
software patents, these particular patents are now no longer a concern.
For details of our website
policies regarding GIFs, see our
web guidelines.
Copyright
Digital Restrictions Management
Network Services
Cultural and Social Issues
Misc
- Posting Videos
- Clearly established
cases of proprietary software that does nasty things to the
users.
- The advantages of free
software.
- The
Bug Nobody is Allowed to Understand, By Richard Stallman.
- The Curious
Incident of Sun in the Night-Time, by Richard M. Stallman.
- SCO, GNU, and
Linux, by Richard Stallman, discusses how SCO's lawsuit against
IBM pertains to the work of the GNU project. Please see
the FSF SCO Response Page for
more details on this subject.
- FSF's Statement in
Response to Proposed Revised Final Judgment in Microsoft vs. United
States, submitted to the US Department of Justice under the Tunney
Act.
- U.S. Congress Threatens
to Establish a New Kind of Monopoly, an attempt of the Congress
to create a private monopoly over repeating publicly known
information.
- The Right Way to Tax DAT
- Censoring My
Software, by Richard Stallman.
- Funding
Art vs Funding Software, by Richard Stallman.
-
Android and Users' Freedom
- Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
- What's Wrong with
YouTube
- Netscape and Free Software,
an old article that clarifies some misunderstandings about an
announcement by Netscape.
- Comments on
Roderick Long's Article.
Terminology and Definitions
Upholding Software Freedom
Philosophical humor