A collected volume of richard-stallman's essays, published by GNU Press in 2002. A second edition followed in 2010 and a third edition in 2015. Full coverage is in the Stallman KB — this entry focuses on the collection's role within the FOSS movement.
Role in the Movement
The collection assembled Stallman's philosophical arguments across two decades in a single volume, making the free software tradition's intellectual case accessible as a coherent body of thought. It includes the gnu-manifesto-1983 alongside essays on copyleft, four-freedoms, the software-freedom-vs-open-source distinction, and critiques of software patents and digital restrictions management.
The collection appeared at a moment — the early open-source-schism-and-dotcom-1998-2004 era — when the "open source" rebranding was reshaping public understanding of the movement. For readers encountering FOSS primarily through cathedral-and-the-bazaar-1997 or the open-sources-anthology-1999, "Free Software, Free Society" represented Stallman's direct counter-argument: the movement is not fundamentally about development methodology but about user freedom, and the ethical stakes matter independently of whether the bazaar model produces better software.
The free-software-foundation, which Stallman founded, distributes the collection and has kept it in print through successive editions. The 2010 second edition incorporated updates relevant to the gpl-v3 debates and DRM; the 2015 third edition extended the analysis further.
The collection is significant as the closest thing the free software tradition has to a systematic statement of principles. It complements the more legally-focused work of the GPL licenses themselves by providing the ethical framework that motivated those legal innovations. For understanding why gpl-v2 was written the way it was, or why Stallman insisted on gpl-v3's anti-tivoization provisions despite the Linux kernel staying on v2, these essays provide the intellectual context.