http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/05/05/richard_stallman_adopts_gpl_ope...

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In the late 90s, I kept some personal information in http://www.gnu.org/people/rms.html. It would have been improper for me to post my other political opinions there. Eventually we found that maintaining substantial amounts of text in that directory for GNU contributors was too much of a burden for the GNU webmasters. So we decided not to use it that way any more. I therefore wanted to set up a personal web site for my personal material.

I decided for ethical reasons that the site had to be running a free software operating system, and that it must not put any ads onto my pages. I was prepared to pay for the service, but preferred to avoid the expense if possible. A friend was in a position to sponsor my usage of the site that his company used. That site runs FreeBSD, which is a free system. So I chose that site.

In 2003 my friend was no longer able to sponsor the site, so I looked for new hosting. Once again, I considered only machines running free operating systems. I received several acceptable offers; the best one is a site running GNU/Linux. Any free operating system is acceptable, but I prefer to use a version of the GNU system.

A couple of other points.

* There is no "GNU Project License"; "GNU GPL" is short for the GNU General Public License.

* It is not really accurate to say that GNU/Linux is a GPL-covered system and *BSD is not. GNU/Linux contains free software such as TeX and X11 and Apache that have other licenses, while *BSD systems contain GPL-covered programs such as GCC. What is true is that the developers of the *BSD systems do not use the GNU GPL for their own code. Posted by: Richard Stallman on May 16, 2003 11:49 AM

----------------------------------------- Enjoy your Freedom,use GNU/Linux. http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html -----------------------------------------