Free software fundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to distribute and modify computer software without restriction. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA.

From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community.

Bussines model

According to the "About the GNU Project" article [1] by Richard Stallman in the first years the FSF gained some profit from Emacs tape distribution business that he started earlier (see selling free software copies). Later this has been extended by adding other free software (both GNU and non-GNU) to the tape, and by selling free manuals as well. According to the same article the FSF incomes over the past years can be described as quote:

The FSF accepts donations, but most of its income has always come from sales—of copies of free software, and of other related services. Today it sells CD-ROMs of source code, CD-ROMs with binaries, nicely printed manuals (all with freedom to redistribute and modify), and Deluxe Distributions (where we build the whole collection of software for your choice of platform).

References

1. "About the GNU Project" article by Richard Stallman