Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is an USA based open source organisation with branches in a number of other countries, organised as charities in some jurisdictions, and as companies in jurisdictions where for profit charities are not allowed. Originally founded to develop an open source UNIX clone (later known as HURD). In its early years the company collected donations and spent them on paying full time developers. However in later years they have discontinued that practice for the most part, with donations being spent on organisational, legal and propaganda expenses. This has left most of their software collection unmaintained, with the exception of the most popular projects that are well known enough to be maintained by third party volunteers.

Projects
Most of the software the FSF holds out gets the GNU moniker, but that is name they took from Gnuplot.
 * GNU autoconf
 * GNU Emacs

Licences
Open source licences written by or at the behest of the FSF.
 * GNU General Public Licence
 * GPL v2
 * GPL v3
 * LGPL v2
 * LGPL v2.1
 * LGPL v3

Known personnel

 * Richard Stallman (Founder)
 * Peter Gerwinski (FSF Germany)

Links

 * Free Software Foundation homepage