The history of Free Software is a mixture of technological and philosophical turning points where organisations has come and gone over the years. The Free Software Foundation can be seen as the first organisation to focus exclusively on the issues of Free Software. Today, there exists four major Free Software Foundations distributed over the world (North America, Europe, Latin America and India).

In this essay, we will look at some parts of the history of Free Software, and in that context examine the work of the Free Software Foundations in particular, and other organisations that are dedicated to the same goals or share the same visions in general.

It will examine the role of the Free Software Foundations and how this has changed over the years and how it is likely to change in the future, in particular when relating the work of the Free Software Foundations to the work of organisations such as the Open Source Initiative and Creative Commons.

The visions of the Free Software Fondations are expressed most clearly in the philosophical documents written by Richard Stallman and others, and the software licenses that the Free Software Foundation develops (GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License and the GNU Free Documentation License) which also embody the spirit and vision of the Free Software Foundations.

The licenses themselves are particularly interesting when looking at the visions of the Free Software Foundations. While they are legal documents, they also contain preambles that explain the rationale for using the license. In essence, they form a part of the whole vision, that is dissiminated by the mere use of those licenses.

When we compare the vision of the Free Software Foundation with the visions expressed by the other initiatives, we find that some words and phrases seem to appear more often than others. One of those words is ``free'', though the meaning of the word changes slightly depending upon the point of view of the organisation expressing it. The exact definition of ``free'' and ``freedom'' is never discussed but there seems to be a common understanding that freedom is good, and this idea is perhaps more important than actually discussing the exact definition of freedom.

In 2001, Richard Stallman wrote an article for Nature Debates, in which he argues that science must push copyright aside for its publication of scientific journals. ``Articles should be distributed in non-proprietary formats, with open access for all. And everyone should have the right to mirror articles; that is, to republish them verbatim with proper attribution''.

The Open Access Initiative is one of the organisations that makes the claim that articles that should be freely available (``open access'') to anyone who wishes to enjoy them. By freely available, they mean ``its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.''
The only restriction that OAI mentions ``should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited''.

The Creative Commons Attribution license requires special attention here since it is one of the most prominent CC licenses. Any of the standard Creative Commons licenses will include the Attribution license, forming licenses such as Attribution-ShareAlike, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike and others. The freedoms expressed by this license, and thus shared with all the other licenses, are the freedoms to ``copy, distribute, display, and perform [a] copyrighted work -- and derivative works based upon it'', but only if you give the authors credit. Again, we see a clear resemblence to the freedoms as they are expressed by both the Free Software Foundation and the OAI.

As will be shown, the Free Software Foundations maintain a vision of freedom that can also be seen in many other organisations. The founding of the Free Software Foundation created a community in which
the ideas of freedom in the domains of culture, scientific material and software could be expressed. A number of organisations have then implemented these thoughts in their specific domain, and we see that implementations by different organisations in the same domain yields similar results when based on the shared idea of freedom.