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+Foreword to the Third Edition {#foreword-to-the-third-edition .unnumbered}
+=============================
+
+@firstcopyingnotice{{Copyright © 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.\
+ {This is the foreword to @fsfsthreecite}
+
+A love letter to Richard Stallman, by Jacob Appelbaum\
+ @smallskip We live in information societies where machines intermediate
+our lives.
+
+Software and hardware are as important to our information age as the
+internet itself. Free Software is the political theory born from the
+mind of a revolutionary who believes that, just as we should have
+control over our own lives, we should also be able to understand and
+control the machines that are extensions of ourselves. This theory, as
+supported by the Free Software Foundation, has become a practice and a
+tradition for millions of people over the last three decades.
+
+Free Software as a political theory acknowledges the role of software
+and hardware systems in our societies. Critiquing past and present
+systems is necessary. We may find ourselves unable to understand or
+modify these systems. We become beholden to others in ways that produce
+injustices and are themselves an injustice. The outcomes of these
+systems are not always obvious, particularly when one is forced into
+using them, and especially when they are normalized and branded as the
+standard. Free Software as a practice is not merely a critique: it is an
+alternative that provides liberty, resting on free standards, freely
+available to all.
+
+Free Software is a paradigm shift where we are at liberty to understand
+and learn from those who have come before us, where we are free to grow
+and share, to learn from mistakes, to benefit as we learn, and to share
+those benefits with everyone. When we use copyleft, we ensure that all
+future users of our work get the same liberty. Free Software ensures
+that future generations will also be able to decode entire histories of
+data. It ensures not only our liberties, but theirs as well.
+
+In times of mass surveillance, Free Software brings much needed
+transparency and with it verifiability. Free Software enables us to
+encrypt, to ensure integrity, to authorize, and to anonymize ourselves.
+In a world of ever increasing privatization, we find in Free Software a
+pillar of communal action towards free societies. The benefits of Free
+Software are impossible to fully enumerate as they vary as much as the
+benefits of liberty itself. Advancing the cause of Free Software is
+never ending, like all struggles for justice, and requires eternal
+vigilance. Advancing the cause of Free Software is difficult, and those
+advocating and implementing Free Software are often carrying essential
+ideas forward against all odds.
+
+The efforts invested in Free Software are not merely about knowledge,
+they are about empowerment: empowerment to study, empowerment to modify,
+empowerment to share, and empowerment to enable sharing with others.
+Commitment to liberty in an information age requires a refusal to
+compromise on the core principles of Free Software, with a commitment
+and honesty that demands sacrifice. Many may refuse this burden, working
+only to enrich themselves in the present moment; others will work to
+increase the breadth and depth of human knowledge. Implemented as Free
+Software, we find a model of sustainability and long-term vision that
+increases not only knowledge but practical direct ability freely shared
+for all without exception. This is a worthy cause and its thoughtfulness
+has already enabled all of us; from the mundane to the most
+extraordinary, Free Software is involved.
+
+Richard Stallman is the revolutionary and theorist who has given the
+world Free Software. His essays cover topics that have been essential
+reading for decades, widely read and understood by people creating
+systems for our information age and beyond. He has dedicated his life to
+the liberation of humanity, and this book explains how we might each
+help with this cause of liberation.
+
+JACOB APPELBAUM
+
+@appelbaumbio
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This document was generated by *tonghuix* on *March 25, 2016* using
+[*texi2html 1.82*](http://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/).\