THE CODE IS LAW Open Source or Free Source? "Proprietary software is an injustice. It denies users freedom and keeps them divided and helpless." Richard Stallman didn’t drop this line just to sound nice; he said it because he saw, before anyone else, that if you don’t own the code you use, the code owns you. To understand this, you have to travel back to the 70s at MIT. Stallman lived in an era where sharing code was the norm, as natural as sharing cooking recipes. But corporations arrived, turned off the tap, and slapped copyrights on everything. Suddenly, helping your neighbor became "piracy." The definitive mental click was a Xerox printer that kept jamming. RMS wanted to fix the code so it would notify users of the error, but Xerox refused to give him the source code. That’s when he understood everything: trade secrets had been placed above utility and community. In 1983, he flipped the table and announced the GNU Project. His goal was to create a complete, free operating system. And mind you, this wasn't a technical mission, it was a moral one. If software is the foundation of modern society, that foundation cannot be a black box controlled by a corporation. Free Software guarantees four non-negotiable rights: use, study, share, and improve. Without these freedoms, you don't own your technology; you are merely a digital tenant. This entire philosophy is captured in his book Free Software, Free Society. "Free" means liberty, not zero cost (free speech, not free beer). "Open Source" was coined later to strip away Stallman's uncomfortable ethical philosophy and make the concept palatable to corporations. They wanted to sell the idea to companies without scaring them off with speeches about freedom. So they created the term "Open Source." The difference is fundamental: Free Software is an ethical philosophy stating that closed code is immoral because it subjugates the user; Open Source is a development methodology that allows more eyes to find bugs. Open Source won the corporate marketing war—Google and Facebook love it—but Free Software keeps the soul. You can have Open Source that spies on you, like the base of Android, but real Free Software seeks to empower you and protect your privacy.