Stallman's essay, Why Software Should Be Free; take a look at it for some
insight into why we support Free Software as we do. Recently, some people
have started calling Free Software ``Open Source Software''; the two terms
are interchangable.

You may wonder why would people spend hours of their own time writing
software and carefully packaging it, only to give it all away. The answers
are as varied as the people who contribute.

Many believe in sharing information and having the freedom to cooperate
with one another, and they feel that free software encourages this. A long
tradition that upholds these values, sometimes called the Hacker1.2 Ethic,
started in the 1950s. The Debian GNU/Linux Project was founded based on
these Free Software ethics of freedom, sharing, and cooperation.

Others want to learn more about computers. More and more people are
looking for ways to avoid the inflated price of proprietary software. A
growing community contributes in appreciation for all the great free
software they've received from others.

Many in academia create free software to help get the results of their
research into wider use. Businesses help maintain free software so they
can have a say in how it develops - there's no quicker way to get a new
feature than to implement it yourself or hire a consultant to do so!
Business is also interested in greater reliability and the ability to
choose between support vendors.

Still others see free software as a social good, democratizing access to
information and preventing excessive centralization of the world's
information infrastructure. Of course, a lot of us just find it great fun.