The next freedom is the freedom to redistribute copies; it's like sharing a recipe with your friend who cooks. This freedom is essential because the spirit of good-will is society's most important resource. Society is based on this spirit of good-will, the willingness to do things because they help your neighbor. I don't believe we should force people, "Cooperate with him, right now!" But you should be free to cooperate, and we should encourage the spirit of cooperation, and the last thing we should ever do is tell you "You are prohibited from cooperating; don't ever cooperate!" Society can't live with that kind of division being spread between all its members. With free software, we never say that you must redistribute, but you can if you wish. So we request and encourage and permit cooperation. And then there is the freedom to publish an improved version. So you have the freedom to make changes. Let's suppose you use this freedom: you make changes that make the program better for you. Well, at this point, other people might like them, too. So you have the freedom to publish the improved version, and then other people start to benefit from your work. What we see is that this is not just a rare thing. This happens all the time. When a program is free software, we often get a whole community of people helping to improve it. And as a result, free software today has a reputation for being powerful and reliable software. And this is one of the important practical benefits it brings. But I have to say that it's a secondary benefit. The primary benefit is an ethical one, not a practical one. The primary benefit is freedom. Now, remember that free software is a matter of freedom, not price. It doesn't mean no money. It doesn't mean zero price. It's perfectly legitimate to have businesses in the field of free software. It's perfectly legitimate to sell copies of free software. In fact, that's part of the freedom that you must have, the freedom to redistribute copies. And if people pay you for these copies, that's okay, too. I began selling copies of some of my free software in 1985. For a while I was making a good part of my living that way. And since then many others have sold copies of free software. Some of the major companies packaging the GNU and Linux operating system today are selling many thousands of copies every month. But I stopped selling copies in October 1985, because we founded the Free Software Foundation. The Free Software Foundation is a tax-exempt charity, like a hospital or a school or a research organization, and it raises money to promote free software, to promote the freedom to change and redistribute software. One thing the FSF does with the money is hire programmers and technical writers to extend the system both in the code and in the documentation, the two essential arms of the system. [The FSF sells copies of GNU software now,] and we also get donations. (We get a lot of donations from Japan, I am happy to say.) Japanese people who use Free Software often are very ready to contribute to development. So, development in our community goes on in three ways. There is the development supported by the Free Software Foundation, there is development supported by various companies that have an involvement with Free Software, and there are all the individual volunteers. Most of the work is done by individual volunteers. We have shown that groups of volunteers working together and organizing themselves can produce tremendous work and, in fact, it's clear now that the free software community can serve humanity's needs for fairly general published software. By "fairly general" I mean not specific to one very narrow line of work. By "published" I mean that you can go and get a copy to load on to a computer. Now, most software developed in the world is not fairly general published software. Most of it is destined for some very narrow use usually in one user business. That raises different issues. "Published software" is a situation where these freedoms become important. If a program is developed forgone company to use and they have all the rights, then they have the freedom to do what they want. Nobody is being denied any essential freedoms here. It's when a program is "published" that the question arises: When you get a copy, will you have freedom? That's where the issue of free software arises, not typically today in the embedded area where TRON is used today.