Stefan started programming in 1983 and founded his company freiheit.com technologies in 1999 because he “wanted to write code all the time”. His first task in his newly founded company was the installation of GNU/Linux on a new laptop; he was then heading out to build software that would run only in browsers, which used a Unix/Linux backend. As almost everyone was using Windows at that time, he gave his best to convince other people to move over to the free software side, too. In 2003, he became a volunteer and donor for the FSFE and an activist against proprietary software.