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Free Software Support

The free software philosophy rejects a specific widespread business practice, but it is not against business. When businesses respect the users' freedom, we wish them success.

Selling copies of Emacs demonstrates one kind of free software business. When the FSF took over that business, I needed another way to make a living. I found it in selling services relating to the free software I had developed. This included teaching, for subjects such as how to program GNU Emacs and how to customize GCC, and software development, mostly porting GCC to new platforms.

Today each of these kinds of free software business is practiced by a number of corporations. Some distribute free software collections on CD-ROM; others sell support at levels ranging from answering user questions to fixing bugs to adding major new features. We are even beginning to see free software companies based on launching new free software products.

Watch out, though -- a number of companies that associate themselves with the term ``Open Source'' actually base their business on non-free software that works with free software. These are not free software companies, they are proprietary software companies whose products tempt users away from freedom. They call these ``value added,'' which reflects the values they would like us to adopt: convenience above freedom. If we value freedom more, we should call them ``freedom subtracted'' products.


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Next: Technical Goals Up: The GNU Operating System Previous: The Free Software Foundation

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Last updated: 1999-08-06