Richard Stallman, the MIT hacker who’s generally credited with starting the free software movement, was inspired to launch the GNU project, a free software operating system, in 1983, after attempting to customize a Xerox printer in MIT’s AI Lab and finding that he could not access or modify its source code. Stallman wanted to liberate code from proprietary use. The term “free” refers to being able to do what you want with the code, rather than the code being free of charge. (Thus the oft-repeated phrase, attributed to Stallman, “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer,” and the occasional use
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