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Foreword to the Third Edition {#foreword-to-the-third-edition .unnumbered}
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@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

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