The Free Software Movement, or FSM for short, is on a grander level, a call for free social and intellectual progression and interaction. This is achieved through the push for the freedom to change and redistribute software code and run software freely without charge or secrecy of code. This process is said to remove politics and big business out of software, allowing for efficiency in code, greater spreading of knowledge, and a liberated cyberspace.
One such leader of the Free Software Movement is programmer and activist Richard Stallman who in 1983 launched the GNU Project. This project was aimed at creating a full free operating system and is still in use today. Such leaders like Stallman have inspired the creation of software packaged like R.
R was created in 1993 by Ihaka and Gentleman as a free dynamic programming language and software environment. It is great for implementing graphics and performing mathematics and statistics. Nowadays, Rstudio is used as an open source software for R, allowing for access to hundreds of packages and libraries through the R-Cran network. Such packages include ggplot for great visuals and lm for linear models. R continues to grow in popularity thanks to the great functionality of R studio, its open and free source software, and its uses for data science.