The Free Software Foundation (often abbreviated for "FSF")
is a non-profit corporation, based in
Boston,
Massachusetts,
that was originally founded by
Richard Stallman
in 1985.
The goal of the Free Software Foundation is to support the development
of free software (by which the Free Software Foundation means "free"
as in "freedom"). In the early days, the Free Software Foundation
was largely focused on the development of the GNU Project (which aimed
to build a substantial body of free software, including a free operating
system), but in more recent years, the organization, although
still pushing forward the GNU Project, has also begun to provide
a much broader range of support to free software developers, including
campaigns, legal education, legal enforcement of free software
projects' copyrights (for those projects for which the FSF holds the copyright),
issuing of awards, hosting of development projects, and more.
For many people, the Free Software Foundation is most familiar for the
software licenses and other licenses that it has developed. These include
the GPL version 2,
the GPL version 3,
the LGPL,
and the GFDL (the "GNU Free Documentation License"). These licenses
are used by both the FSF itself for its own projects, and are also available
to be used by (and are in fact used by) others - for example, the
Linux kernel is released under
the GPL version 2,
and
OpenOffice is released under
the LGPL.
The Free Software Foundation has also established a number of
sister organizations around the world:
the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) in
Germany,
the Free Software Foundation of India in
Thiruvananthapuram, India,
and Free Software Foundation Latin America in
Argentina.
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