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Free software or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. In practice, for software to be distributed as free software, the human readable form of the program (the "source code") must be made available to the recipient along with a notice granting the above permissions. In Computer science, source code (commonly just source or code) is any sequence of statements or declarations written in some Human-readable Such a notice is a "free software licence", or, in theory, could be a notice saying that the source code is released into the public domain. A free software licence is a Software licence which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the Software which would otherwise be prohibited by Copyright The public domain is a range of abstract materials &ndash commonly referred to as Intellectual property &ndash which are not owned or controlled by anyone

The free software movement was conceived in 1983 by Richard Stallman to make these freedoms available to every computer user. The free software movement (also known as open source movement, free and open source software movement and abbreviated FSM OSM or FOSSM) is a relatively Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16 1953 often abbreviated " rms " is an American software freedom activist [1] From the late 1990s onward, alternative terms for free software came into use. Alternative terms for free software have been a controversial issue among Free software users from the late 1990s onwards "Open source software" is the most common such alternative term. Open source software (OSS began as a marketing campaign for Free software. Others include "software libre", "free, libre and open-source software" ("FOSS", or, with "libre", "FLOSS"). Free and open source software, also F/OSS, FOSS, or FLOSS (for Free/Libre/Open Source Software) is software which is liberally licensed The antonym of free software is "proprietary software" or non-free software. Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing.

Free software is distinct from "freeware" which is proprietary software made available free of charge. Freeware is computer Software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing. Users usually cannot study, modify, or redistribute freeware.

Since free software may be freely redistributed, it generally is available at little or no cost. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as support, training, customization, integration, or certification. At the same time, some business models which work with proprietary software are not compatible with free software, such as those that depend on a user having no choice but to pay for a licence in order to lawfully use a software product. Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing.

Contents

History

Main article: History of free software

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the freedoms that are provided by free software. This is a timeline-style look at how Free software has evolved and existed from its inception The 1950s Decade refers to the years of 1950 to 1959 inclusive The 1960s decade refers to the years from the beginning of 1960 to the end of 1969 This article is about the Decade 1970-1979 For the Year 1970 see 1970. Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who were glad that people were making software that made their hardware useful. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began to apply copyright law to software distribution. The 1980s was the decade spanning from January 1 1980 to December 31 1989. The software industry comprises businesses involved in the development, maintenance and publication of Computer software. Copyright is a legal concept enacted by Governments, giving the creator of an original work of authorship Exclusive rights to control its distribution usually for A software distribution, also referred to as a software distro, is a bundle of a specific Software (or a collection of multiple even an entire Operating They began using technical measures (such as only distributing binary copies of computer programs) to prevent computer users from being able to study and modify software. In Computing, an executable (file causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions," as opposed to a file that only contains Computer programs (also software programs, or just programs) are instructions for a Computer. Users in a Computing context refers to one who uses a computer system [2]

In 1983, Richard Stallman, longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and then editor of the important hobbyist magazine Dr. Dobb's Journal, announced the GNU project, saying that he had become frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users. Year 1983 ( MCMLXXXIII) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays the 1983 Gregorian calendar) Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16 1953 often abbreviated " rms " is an American software freedom activist Dr Dobb's Journal ( DDJ) is a monthly Journal published in the United States by CMP Technology. The GNU Project is a Free software, Mass collaboration project announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. GNU ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free software. Year 1984 ( MCMLXXXIV) was a Leap year starting on Sunday (link displays the 1984 Gregorian calendar) The Free Software Foundation ( FSF) is a Non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the Free software movement Year 1985 ( MCMLXXXV) was a Common year starting on Tuesday (link displays 1985 Gregorian calendar) He developed a free software definition and the concept of "copyleft", designed to ensure software freedom for all. Copyleft is a play on the word Copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions

Richard Stallman at DTU in Denmark 31 March 2007
Richard Stallman at DTU in Denmark 31 March 2007

Free software is a huge international effort, producing software used by individuals, large organizations, and governmental administrations. Free software has a very high market penetration in server-side Internet applications such as the Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP scripting language. MySQL is a Relational database management system (RDBMS which has more than 11 million installations PHP is a computer Scripting language. Originally designed for producing Dynamic web pages it has evolved to include a Command line interface capability Completely free computing environments are available as large packages of basic system software such as the many Linux distributions and FreeBSD. A Linux distribution (also called GNU/Linux by distributions such as Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mandriva and FreeBSD is a Unix-like free Operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD branch through Free software developers have also created free versions of almost all commonly used desktop applications, including Web browsers, office productivity suites, and multimedia players. Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a Software product It is important to note, however, that in many categories, free software for individual workstations or home users has only a fraction of the market share of its proprietary competitors. A workstation, such as a Unix workstation, RISC workstation or Engineering workstation, is a high-end Microcomputer Most free software is distributed online without charge, or off-line at the marginal cost of distribution, but this pricing model is not required, and people may sell copies of free software programs for any price. In Economics and Finance, marginal cost is the change in Total cost that arises when the quantity produced changes by one unit

The economic viability of free software has been recognised by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology In Computing, Red Hat Inc ( is a company dedicated to Free and open source software, and a major Linux distribution vendor Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Many companies whose core business is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to the lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages. Also, some non-software industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development process; scientists, for example, are looking towards more open development processes, and hardware such as microchips are beginning to be developed with specifications released under copyleft licenses (see the OpenCores project, for instance). Copyleft is a play on the word Copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions OpenCores is a loose community of people who are interested in developing Digital Open source hardware through Electronic design automation, with a similar Creative Commons and the free culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement. Creative Commons (CC is a Non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share The free culture movement is a Social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify Creative works, using the Internet as well as other

Naming

The FSF recommends using the term "free software" rather than "open source software" because that term and the associated marketing campaign focuses on the technical issues of software development, avoiding the issue of user freedoms. [3] "Libre" is used to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free". However, amongst English speakers, libre is primarily only used within the Free Software Movement. The free software movement (also known as open source movement, free and open source software movement and abbreviated FSM OSM or FOSSM) is a relatively

Definition

Main articles: The Free Software Definition, Debian Free Software Guidelines, and Open Source Definition

The first formal definition of free software was published by FSF in February 1986. The Free Software Definition, written by Richard Stallman and published by Free Software Foundation (FSF defines Free software - free in the "free The Debian Free Software Guidelines ( DFSG) is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a Free software license The Open Source Definition is used by the Open Source Initiative to determine whether or not a software license can be considered open source. [4] That definition, written by Richard Stallman, is still maintained today and states that software is free software if people who receive a copy of the software have the following four freedoms:

Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code is highly impractical. In Computer science, source code (commonly just source or code) is any sequence of statements or declarations written in some Human-readable

Thus, free software means that computer users have the freedom to cooperate with whom they choose, and to control the software they use. Users in a Computing context refers to one who uses a computer system To summarize this into a remark distinguishing libre (freedom) software from gratis (zero price) software, Richard Stallman has long said: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16 1953 often abbreviated " rms " is an American software freedom activist To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'". Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without Censorship or Limitation. Free Beer, formerly known as Vores Øl, Danish for Our Beer, is the first brand of Beer with a "free" recipe - free as in "freedom" [5]

In the late 90s, other groups published their own definitions which describe an almost identical set of software. The most notable are Debian Free Software Guidelines published in 1997,[6] and the Open Source Definition, published in 1998. The Debian Free Software Guidelines ( DFSG) is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a Free software license The Open Source Definition is used by the Open Source Initiative to determine whether or not a software license can be considered open source.

The BSD-based operating systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, do not have their own formal definitions of free software but users of these systems generally find the same set of software to be acceptable. FreeBSD is a Unix-like free Operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD branch through OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer Operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD a Unix derivative developed at the NetBSD is a freely redistributable Open source version of the Unix -derivative Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD Computer Operating However, rather than advocate the use of copyleft free software licenses, they see copyleft as being merely tolerable. Instead, they advocate permissive free software licenses which allow others to make software based on their source code and then not, in turn, also distribute the source. Their view is that this permissive approach is more free. The Kerberos, X.org, and Apache software licenses are substantially similar in intent and implementation. Kerberos is a Computer network Authentication protocol, which allows individuals communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one The XOrg Server (officially the XOrg Foundation Open Source Public Implementation of X11) is the X server in the official reference implementation of the X All of these software packages originated in academic institutions interested in the widest possible technology transfer (University of California, MIT, and UIUC). The University of California ( UC) is a Public university system in the state of California. This article is about the flagship campus For other uses and locations of University of Illinois, see University of Illinois (disambiguation The University of

Examples of free software

Main articles: List of open source software packages, Portal:Free software/Categories, and :Category:Free software

Notable free software:

The Free Software Directory is a free software project that maintains a large database of free software packages. The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF and UNESCO.

Free software licenses

Main article: Free software licenses

All free software licenses must grant people all the freedoms discussed above. A free software licence is a Software licence which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the Software which would otherwise be prohibited by Copyright However, unless the applications' licenses are compatible, combining programs by mixing source code or directly linking binaries is problematic, because of license technicalities. Programs indirectly connected together may avoid this problem.

The majority of free software uses a small set of licenses. The most popular of these licenses are:

The Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licenses that they find to comply with their own definitions of free software and open-source software respectively. The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) or LGPL is a Free software license published by the Free Software BSD licenses represent a family of Permissive free software licences. The Mozilla Public License (MPL is a free and Open source Software license. The MIT License is a Free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT used by the MIT X Consortium.

These lists are necessarily incomplete, because a license need not be known by either organization in order to provide these freedoms. The following is a list of Software licences which Free Software Foundation (FSF has approved as complying with their Free Software Definition. An open source license is a copyright License for Computer software that makes the source code available under terms that allow for modification and redistribution

Apart from these two organizations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free and open source software. The Debian Free Software Guidelines ( DFSG) is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a Free software license Debian doesn't publish a list of approved licenses, so its judgments have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives. That is summarized at the Debian web site. [7]

However, it is rare that a license is announced as being in-compliance by either FSF or OSI guidelines and not vice versa (the Netscape Public License used for early versions of Mozilla being an exception), so exact definitions of the terms have not become hot issues. S T U V Tragedy of the commons --> The Netscape Public License (NPL is a Free software license, the license under which Netscape Communications Corporation originally released Mozilla

Permissive and copyleft licenses

The FSF categorizes licenses in the following ways:

Security and reliability

There is debate over the security of free software in comparison to proprietary software, with a major issue being security through obscurity. This article describes how security can be achieved through design and engineering In Cryptography and Computer security, security through obscurity (sometimes security by obscurity) is a controversial principle in Security engineering A popular quantitative test in computer security is using relative counting of known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products which lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available. Some claim that this method is biased by counting more vulnerabilities for the free software, since its source code is accessible and its community is more forthcoming about what problems exist. [8]

Free software advocates rebut that even if proprietary software does not have "published" flaws, flaws could still exist and possibly be known to malicious users. The ability of users to view and modify the source code allows many more people to potentially analyse the code and possibly to have a higher rate of finding bugs and flaws than an average sized corporation could manage. Users having access to the source code also makes creating and deploying spyware far more difficult. Such content will be deleted Specific software is to be mentioned in this article only [9]

David A. Wheeler has published research concluding that free software is quantitatively more reliable than proprietary software. David A Wheeler (born 1965 is a Computer scientist. In 2001 Wheeler posted a self-published work on his webpage where he applied metrics for costing [10]

Adoption

Free software played a part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of dot-com companies. A Dot-com company, or simply a dot-com, is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a Website that uses the popular [11] [12] Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use; free software is a pure public good rather than a private good. In Economics, a public good is a good that is non-rivaled and non-excludable. A private good is defined in Economics as a good that exhibits these properties Excludable - it is reasonably possible to prevent a class of Companies that contribute to free software can increase commercial innovation amidst the void of patent cross licensing lawsuits. The term innovation means a new way of doing something It may refer to incremental radical and revolutionary changes in thinking products processes or organisations A patent is a set of Exclusive rights granted by a State to an inventor or his assignee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an A cross-licensing agreement is a Contract between two or more parties where each party grants rights to their Intellectual property to the other parties (See mpeg2 patent holders)

Under the free software business model, free software vendors may charge a fee for distribution and offer pay support and software customization services. MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information" Proprietary software uses a different business model, where a customer of the proprietary software pays a fee for a license to use the software. This license may grant the customer the ability to configure some or no parts of the software themselves. Often some level of support is included in the purchase of proprietary software, but additional support services (especially for enterprise applications) are usually available for an additional fee. Some proprietary software vendors will also customize software for a fee.

Free software is generally available at little to no cost and can result in permanently lower costs compared to proprietary software. Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing. With free software, businesses can fit software to their specific needs by changing the software themselves or by hiring programmers to modify it for them. Free software often has no warranty, and more importantly, generally does not assign legal liability to anyone. However, warranties are permitted between any two parties upon the condition of the software and its usage. Such an agreement is made separately from the free software license.

Controversies

Binary blobs

Main article: Binary blobs

In 2006, OpenBSD started the first campaign against the use of binary blobs, in kernels. In open source culture, binary blob is a pejorative term for an object file loaded into the kernel of a free or open source OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer Operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD a Unix derivative developed at the In open source culture, binary blob is a pejorative term for an object file loaded into the kernel of a free or open source Blobs are usually freely distributable device drivers for hardware from vendors that do not reveal driver source code to users or developers. In computing a device driver or software driver is a Computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a Hardware device This restricts the users' freedom to effectively modify the software and distribute modified versions. Also, since the blobs are undocumented and may have bugs, they pose a security risk to any operating system whose kernel includes them. A software bug (or just “bug” is an error flaw mistake Failure, fault or “undocumented feature” in a Computer program that prevents it An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination The proclaimed aim of the campaign against blobs is to collect hardware documentation that allows developers to write free software drivers for that hardware, ultimately enabling all free operating systems to become or remain blob-free.

The issue of binary blobs in the Linux kernel and other device drivers motivated some developers in Ireland to launch gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distribution with all the binary blobs removed. Linux is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like Operating systems These are popularly termed Linux operating systems and The gNewSense GNU/Linux distribution is an Operating system designed for users who wish to only use Free software on Personal computers The project received support from the Free Software Foundation[13]

BitKeeper

Main article: BitKeeper#License concerns

Larry McVoy invited high-profile free software projects to use his proprietary versioning system, BitKeeper, free of charge, in order to attract paying users. The Free Software Foundation ( FSF) is a Non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the Free software movement BitKeeper is a Software tool for Distributed revision control ( Configuration management, SCM, etc Larry McVoy (b 1962 in Concord Massachusetts) is the CEO of BitMover, the company that makes BitKeeper, a Version control system Revision control (also known as version control (system (VCS, source control or (source code management (SCM) is the management of multiple revisions BitKeeper is a Software tool for Distributed revision control ( Configuration management, SCM, etc In 2002, Linux coordinator Linus Torvalds decided to use BitKeeper to develop the Linux kernel, a free software project, claiming no free software alternative met his needs. Linus Benedict Torvalds ( ˈtuːrvalds born December 28 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer This controversial decision drew criticism from several sources, including the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman. [14]

Following the apparent reverse engineering of BitKeeper's protocols, McVoy withdrew permission for gratis use by free software projects, leading the Linux kernel community to develop a free software replacement in Git. Reverse engineering (RE is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device object or system through analysis of its structure function and operation Git is a free Distributed revision control, or software Source code management project with an emphasis on being fast

Patent deals

Main article: Software patents and free software

In November of 2006, the Microsoft and Novell software corporations announced a controversial partnership involving, among other things, patent protection for some customers of Novell under certain conditions. Opposition to Software patents is widespread in the Free software community. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational Computer technology Corporation, which rose to dominate the Home computer Novell Inc ( is a global Software Corporation based in the United States specializing in enterprise operating systems such as SUSE [15]

See also

References

  1. ^ GNU project Initial Announcement. _____ __ / ___/ / /_ ____ ____ \__ \ / __/ / __ \ / __ \ ___/ / / /_ The free software community is an informal term referring to the users and developers of Free software as well as supporters of the Free software movement. A free file format is a File format whose full specification is freely available and for which there are no restrictions (e A free software licence is a Software licence which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the Software which would otherwise be prohibited by Copyright This is a list of open-source software packages: Computer software licensed under an Open-source license. This article is about free software as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement for information on software distributed without charge see Freeware. This is a list of notable software packages which were published under a Proprietary software license but later released as free and Open source software Libre Knowledge is knowledge which may be acquired interpreted and applied freely it can be re-formulated according to one's needs and shared with others for community benefit
  2. ^ David A. Wheeler. David A Wheeler (born 1965 is a Computer scientist. In 2001 Wheeler posted a self-published work on his webpage where he applied metrics for costing Appendix "History" of Why OSS/FS, Look at the Numbers!.  “However, as years progressed, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, software developers increasingly closed off their software source code from users. ”
  3. ^ Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software.  “The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community, but does not teach them to defend it. ”
  4. ^ GNU's Bulletin, Volume 1 Number 1, page 8.
  5. ^ Free Software Foundation. The Free Software Definition. Retrieved on 2007-04-22. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1500 - Portuguese Navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral becomes the first European to sight Brazil.
  6. ^ Bruce Perens. Debian's "Social Contract" with the Free Software Community. debian-announce mailing list.
  7. ^ Debian -- License information. Retrieved on 2008-01-08. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 871 - Battle of Ashdown - Ethelred of Wessex defeats a Danish invasion army
  8. ^ Firefox more secure than MSIE after all. News. com.
  9. ^ Transcript where Stallman explains about spyware.
  10. ^ David A. Wheeler. High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS)... with Lots on Formal Methods.
  11. ^ Netcraft. Web Server Usage Survey.
  12. ^ The Apache Software Foundation. Apache Strategy in the New Economy.
  13. ^ GNU/Linux distributions we know of which consist entirely of free software, and whose main distribution sites distribute only free software.
  14. ^ Richard Stallman thanking Larry McVoy for ending the gratis licenses for BitKeeper. NewsForge. SourceForge Inc ( formerly VA Software Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and VA Research, is the provider of the SourceForge Development
  15. ^ Ars Technica article on the Microsoft-Novell patent deal.

External links

Dictionary

free software

-noun

  1. According to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, free software is software that everyone is free to copy, redistribute and modify. That implies it must be available as source code. It does not imply that it is free of charge, so anyone can sell free software so long as they don't impose any new restrictions on its redistribution or use.
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