The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is the nonprofit organization co-founded by stallman, harold-abelson, robert-chassell, gerald-sussman, and leonard-tower-jr on October 4, 1985, to support the gnu-project and promote the free-software-definition. It is the institutional embodiment of Stallman's philosophy of software freedom.
The FSF holds the copyrights on much of the GNU software, including gnu-emacs-manual and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), and is the steward of the GPL family of licenses: gpl-v1, gpl-v2, gpl-v3, lgpl, agpl, and fdl. The founding-of-fsf event marked the formalization of the gnu-project's legal and organizational infrastructure.
The FSF's primary missions include: maintaining the GPL license family, advocating for the four-freedoms, campaigning against digital-restrictions-management (which it calls "digital restrictions management"), opposing software-patents-opposition, and certifying hardware as "Respects Your Freedom."
eben-moglen served as the FSF's general counsel for many years and led the drafting of gpl-v3. bradley-kuhn served as executive director before founding the software-freedom-conservancy.
The FSF's relationship with linus-torvalds and the Linux community became strained over gpl-v3, with Torvalds declining to upgrade Linux from gpl-v2. The fsf-board-controversy-2019 led to Stallman's temporary resignation from the board.
The FSF publishes Stallman's essays collected in free-software-free-society and maintains the philosophical writings at the core of stallman-vs-open-source-philosophical-core, asserting the primacy of software-freedom-vs-open-source over the pragmatic framing of the open-source-initiative.