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<title>Free Software Foundation India</title>
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<h1>About FSF India</h1>
</header>
<p>The Free Software Foundation India (FSF India) is a
nonprofit organisation committed to advocating,
promoting and propagating the use and development of
free (swatantra) software in India.</p>
<p>The special need of free software community in the
current historical context.</p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>As the computer continues to become increasingly
pervasive in our personal, social and working
lives, the soul of the machine — software — is
seemingly trapped in a battle of proprietary
ownership.</p>
<p>In the early days of computing, it was customary for
programmers to share software. Since the 1970s,
however, much software has become proprietary, such
that its users have been prevented from sharing, let
alone modifying, programs. By the 1980s, proprietary
software had become commonplace, and the computing
community was losing the freedom to cooperate in using
and altering software. Freedom was under attack.</p>
<h2>The Free Software Foundation</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>The owners of software had erected walls to divide
us from each other.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those words came from the one person who has
zealously campaigned to safeguard software
freedoms–Richard M. Stallman, a celebrated
programmer and an accomplished hacker. (Contrary
to popular belief, a hacker is not an anti-social
being. S/he is someone who is passionate, even
obsessive, about programming, as opposed to a
cracker, someone who breaks security on a system,
often with malicious intent.)</p>
<p>Stallman, then working at MIT’s Artificial
Intelligence Lab, left to pursue the Free Software
Movement in 1984, inspired by the ideals of
American independence: freedom, community and
voluntary co-operation, which leads to free
enterprise, free speech and free software. He had
already started the <a href="https://gnu.org">GNU project</a> in
1983 to develop the free operating system GNU (a recursive
acronym for GNU’s Not Unix).</p>
<p>In 1985 Stallman founded the <a href="https://fsf.org">Free
Software Foundation</a>
(FSF), dedicated to promoting computer users’
rights to use, study, copy, modify and
redistribute computer programs.</p>
<p>The FSF promotes the development and use of free
software and free documentation. In particular,
FSF promotes the GNU operating system, used widely
today in its GNU/Linux variant, based on the Linux
kernel developed by Linus Torvalds. These systems
are often mistakenly called just `Linux’; calling
them `GNU/Linux’ corrects this confusion.</p>
<p>The FSF (<a href="https://fsf.org">fsf.org</a>),
whose headquarters is in Boston, Massachusetts,
USA, is a tax-exempt charity for free software
development. It raises funds by selling GNU
CD-ROMs, T-shirts, manuals and deluxe
distributions (all of which users are free to copy
and change), as well as from donations.</p>
<p>The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the
ethical and political issues of freedom in the use
of software. The FSF believes that free software
is a matter of freedom, not price.</p>
<h2>FSF India</h2>
<p>The Free Software Foundation of India (FSF India),
the official Indian affiliate of the FSF, was
formally inaugurated by Richard Stallman at the
Freedom First! Conference at Thiruvanathapuram,
Kerala on 20 July 2001.</p>
<p>FSF India will be the national agency for the
promotion of the use of <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
software</a>,
i.e. software distributed under the
<a href="https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl">GNU General
Public Licence (GNU GPL)</a> or
<a href="https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html">other
licences</a>
approved by FSF, in all domains.</p>
<h2>The Vision of FSF India</h2>
<p>Broadly, FSF India will strive to ensure that free
software is strengthened in all respects so as to form
a genuine, credible and viable alternative to
proprietary software for every kind of application.</p>
<p>To do so, FSF India will:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Promote awareness about free software among
the general public and, specifically, among
programmers and students.</p></li>
<li><p>Increase access to free software by users
in India.</p></li>
<li><p>Promote the development of local solutions
to local problems by empowering local
programmers in the use of free platforms,
tools and technologies.</p></li>
<li><p>Provide support to free software by way of
documentation, expert help or any other means.</p></li>
<li><p>Help organize training for programmers and
users of free software platforms and software.</p></li>
<li><p>Carry out R&D work for free software
solutions to suit local requirements.</p></li>
<li><p>Provide services for the free software
programmer community by, for example, locating
and distributing jobs.</p></li>
<li><p>Assist the national and State governments
in all aspects relating to free software, such
as evolving and maintaining standards;
providing a quality assurance mechanism for
free software; and ensuring the use of free
software in government and quasi-government
milieux.</p></li>
<li><p>Provide services such as adjudication and
conflict redressal within the free software
domain.</p></li>
</ul>
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