this approach and the GNU licence had a direct link to the open education movement.
Stallman advocated that software should be free in this sense of repurposing and set up the Free Software Foundation in 1985. This is an ideological position about freedom. As the GNU organisation puts it, ‘The users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. When users don’t control the program, the program controls the users.’ (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). There are four basic freedoms advocated by the free software movement, which echo the 4 Rs of Reuse and later licences in education:
A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Note that these freedoms are about control, not about cost. Indeed Stallman is quite clear that it does not preclude commercial use and that it is legitimate to purchase ‘free’ software. The oft quoted phrase is ‘freedom as in speech, not as in beer’, but this confusion
