Good 4 The Net

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux variant. 
Read more about free software in our essays section, in the philosophy section of gnu.org, and in the pages of the independently published Free Software Magazine. 
Find over 4,000 free software packages to use in our Free Software Directory. 
How You Can HelpPlease support the work of the FSF by making a donation, joining as an associate member, ordering books and merchandise, or signing your organization up as a corporate patron. 
You can nominate someone in the free software community for the 2005 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software. 
You can also help by working on the development and documentation of free software programs. Please see our list of high priority projects for information on how to contribute to important projects like: 
3D driver for ATI graphics cards 
OpenOffice.org 2.0 
GNU Compiler for Java 
GNU Classpath 
GPLFlash 
You can make your voice heard on important political issues involving principles of the free software movement. 
Oppose the "broadcast flag" 
Here are the FSF's current projects. 
GPLv3.fsf.org 
The first draft of the revised GNU General Public License will be released during the "First International Conference on GPLv3", at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on January 16 and 17  2006. The GPLv3 Development and Publicity Project will bring together organizations, software developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in an effort to update the world's most popular free software license. 

GNU 
FSF remains the primary sponsor of the GNU Project. In addition to the services provided by Savannah for GNU projects, FSF provides development systems for GNU software maintainers, including full email and shell services. We are committed to furthering the development of the GNU Operating System and enabling volunteers to easily contribute to that work. 
Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab 
The commencement of the GNU project in 1984, with its goal to give users freedom, required the establishment of new distribution terms that would prevent the project being turned into proprietary software. The method used was Copyleft and the resulting license was called the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). Today the GNU GPL is the most widely used Free Software license, and as its author, the FSF works to help the wider community use and comprehend it. 
Free Software Directory 
The Free Software Directory was started in September 1999 to catalog all useful free software that runs under free operating systems. The Directory contains over 4,000 entries. The license of each program in the Directory is checked to verify that it is free software. 
Savannah 
Savannah provides software development services at no cost to free software developers around the world. Savannah provides a web front-end for hosting and maintaining project homepages, bug tracking, CVS, FTP, and mailing lists. We provide all of these services running entirely on Free Software, without ads, for the entire community. 
If you have questions about or suggestions for the web site, or have trouble finding pages that we may have moved while redesigning the site, please email us at .