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I feel following are top 5 common myths about Free Software. Description about each myth is picked up from the reference link; mostly as it is. I wish people find references useful.
This is not so true. People often get confuse the word ‘Free’. This free has nothing to do with money as such. Think Free as Freedom and not Free Beer.
When they call software “free,” they mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes Matter fact FSF advices people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.
Reference: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
No they are not.
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”–in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. Most discussion of “open source” pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success
Reference: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
No, they are not.
In fact, Most of the GNU/Linux distribution contains blobs in a form of proprietary firmwares or binaries.
Blobs can take many forms. Sometimes, they will be provided in separate files. Other times, they may be incorporated into the source of the driver itself–for example, it could be encoded as a large array of numbers. But no matter how it’s encoded, any nonfree firmware needs to be removed from a free system.
To know about which GNU/Linux system would be a Free Software, refef http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
In spite of these strict rules we now have around 10 GNU/Linux distributions as Free Software.
Reference : http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
No, it does matter
GNU is a operating system and Linux is one of its kernels.
If you call our operating system Linux, that conveys a mistaken idea of the system’s origin, history, and purpose. If you call it GNU/Linux, that conveys (though not in detail) an accurate idea.
Does this really matter for our community? Is it important whether people know the system’s origin, history, and purpose? Yes–because people who forget history are often condemned to repeat it. The Free World that has developed around GNU/Linux is not guaranteed to survive; the problems that led us to develop GNU are not completely eradicated, and they threaten to come back.
Its not always required to call Linux by GNU/Linux. When you’re referring specifically to the kernel, you should call it Linux.
Reference: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html
There are plenty of motivation factors.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fs-motives.html lists a few.
I find Pragmatic Idealism the most interesting.
People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is a matter of principle, we call that idealism. If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough–you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.
Pragmatically speaking, thinking about greater long-term goals will strengthen your will to resist this pressure. If you focus your mind on the freedom and community that you can build by staying firm, you will find the strength to do it. “Stand for something, or you will fall for anything.
Reference: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html