the GNU Manifesto
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Richard Stallman's 1985 call to build a free Unix-compatible operating system that anyone could share and change.
It launched the GNU Project and articulated the free-software ethic - that users should be free to run, study, modify, and redistribute software. The tools it produced, combined years later with the Linux kernel, became the operating system running much of the internet.
Richard Stallman published the GNU Manifesto in 1985 to explain why he was building a free replacement for Unix. The argument is not that software should be inexpensive; it is that a user who cannot read, modify and share the software running their machine is subject to whoever can.
The reasoning is deliberately about power rather than economics. Proprietary software creates a dependency in which the user must ask permission to fix or understand a tool they rely on, and the manifesto treats that as an ethical problem before a practical one. The GPL implements the position: it grants freedoms and requires that anyone redistributing preserves them, which is why it is called copyleft, and it uses copyright law against the outcome copyright normally produces.
Its influence is easier to see forty years on than the argument itself. GNU tools plus the Linux kernel became the operating system of the internet, and the licence created the conditions for an enormous commons. The permissive licences that later dominated deliberately dropped the reciprocity requirement, which is a genuine philosophical disagreement rather than a simplification, and it is still live every time a company builds on open source without contributing back.
Also known as: GNU Manifesto, Richard Stallman, free software