But people sometimes used to say to me, "what do you mean, it's free software, if it costs $150?" Well, the English word "free" has multiple meanings and they were confused by that. It even took me a few years to realize that I needed to clarify this. One meaning, you see, refers to price, and another meaning refers to freedom. When we speak of free software, we're talking about freedom, not price. So think of "free speech," not "free beer."
Read More: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/google-engineering-talk.html
People outside the free software movement frequently ask about the practical advantages of free software. It is a curious question.
Nonfree software is bad because it denies your freedom. Thus, asking about the practical advantages of free software is like asking about the practical advantages of not being handcuffed. Indeed, it has advantages:
You can wear an ordinary shirt.
You can get through metal detectors without triggering them.
You can keep a hand on the steering wheel while you shift gears.
You can pitch a baseball.
You can carry a backpack.
We could find more, but do you need these advantages to convince you to reject handcuffs? Probably not, because you understand that your freedom is what's at stake.
Once you realize that that's what's at stake with nonfree software, you won't need to ask what practical advantages free software has.
Read more: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/practical.html
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is generally available without charge, but can have a fee, such as in the form of charging for CDs or other distribution medium among other ways.
In practice, for software to be distributed as free software, the human-readable form of the program (the source code) must be made available to the recipient along with a notice granting the above permissions. Such a notice either is a free software license, or a notice that the source code is released into the public domain.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom
Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often shortened to rms, is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and many tools in the GNU Coreutils. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
Read even more: http://www.stallman.org/