Free software

01Free software, Libra software, Libraware, sometimes known as freedom-respecting software, is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions.

02Free software is a matter of liberty, not price.

03All users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software, including profiting from them, regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program.

04Computer programs are deemed free if they give end users, not just the developer, ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

05The right to study and modify a computer program entails that the source code, the preferred format for making changes, be made available to users of that program.

06While this is often called access to source code or public availability, the Free Software Foundation, FSF, recommends against thinking in those terms because it might give the impression that users have an obligation, as opposed to a right, to give non-users a copy of the program.

07Although the term free software had already been used loosely in the past and other permissive software like the Berkeley Software Distribution released in 1978 existed, Richard Stallman is credited with tying it to the sense under discussion and starting the free software movement in 1983 when he launched the GNU project, a collaborative effort to create a freedom-respecting operating system and to revive the spirit of cooperation once prevalent among hackers during the early days of computing.

08Context.

09Free software differs from proprietary software such as Microsoft Office, Windows, Adobe Photoshop, Facebook, or FaceTime.

10Users cannot study, change, and share their source code.

11Freeware or gratis software, which is a category of proprietary software that does not require payment for basic use.

12For software under the purview of copyright to be free, it must carry a software license whereby the author grants users the aforementioned rights.

13Software that is not covered by copyright law, such as software in the public domain, is free as long as the source code is also in the public domain or otherwise available without restrictions.

14Proprietary software uses restrictive software licenses, or EULAs, and usually does not provide users with the source code.

15Users are thus legally or technically prevented from changing the software, and this results in reliance on the publisher to provide updates, help, and support.

16See also vendor lock-in and abandonware.

17Users often may not reverse-engineer, modify, or redistribute proprietary software.

18Beyond copyright law, contracts, and a lack of source code, there can exist additional obstacles keeping users from exercising freedom over a piece of software, such as software patents and digital rights management, more specifically, tivoization.

19Free software can be a for-profit, commercial activity, or not.

20Some free software is developed by volunteer computer programmers while other is developed by corporations, or even by both, naming and differences with open source.

21Although both definitions refer to almost equivalent corpora of programs, the Free Software Foundation recommends using the term free software rather than open source software, an alternative, yet similar, concept coined in 1998, because the goals and messaging are quite dissimilar.

22According to the Free Software Foundation, open source and its associated campaign mostly focus on the technicalities of the public development model and marketing free software to businesses, while taking the ethical issue of user rights very lightly, or even antagonistically.

23Stallman has also stated that considering the practical advantages of free software is like considering the practical advantages of not being handcuffed, in that it is not necessary for an individual to consider practical reasons in order to realize that being handcuffed is undesirable in itself.

24The FSF also notes that open source has exactly one specific meaning in common English, namely that you can look at the source code.

25It states that while the term free software can lead to two different interpretations, at least one of them is consistent with the intended meaning unlike the term open source.

26The lone adjective Libra is often used to avoid the ambiguity of the word free in the English language and the ambiguity with the older usage of free software as public domain software.

27See Gratis vs.

28Libra Definition and the Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software The first formal definition of free software was published by FSF in February 1986.

29That 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.

30The numbering begins with zero, not only as a spoof on the common usage of zero-based numbering in programming languages, but also because Freedom Zero was not initially included in the list, but later added first in the list, as it was considered very important.

31Freedom Zero The freedom to use the program for any purpose Freedom One The freedom to study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish Freedom Two The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor Freedom Three The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements and modified versions in general to the public so that the whole community benefits Freedoms One and Three require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible.

32Thus, free software means that computer users have the freedom to cooperate with whom they choose and to control the software they use.

33To summarize this into a remark distinguishing Libra, Freedom, Software from Gratis, Zero Price, Software, the Free Software Foundation says, Free software is a matter of liberty, not price.

34To understand the concept, you should think of free, as in free speech, not as in free beer.

35See Gratis vs.

36Libra In the late 1990s, other groups published their own definitions that describe an almost identical set of software.

37The most notable are Debian Free Software Guidelines published in 1997 and the Open Source Definition published in 1998.

38The BSD-based operating systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, do not have their own formal definitions of free software.

39Users of these systems generally find the same set of software to be acceptable, but sometimes see copyleft as restrictive.

40They generally advocate permissive free software licenses, which allow others to use the software as they wish, without being legally forced to provide the source code.

41Their view is that this permissive approach is more free.

42The Kerberos, X11, and Apache software licenses are substantially similar in intent and implementation.

43Examples There are thousands of free applications and many operating systems available on the internet.

44Users can easily download and install those applications via a package manager that comes included with most Linux distributions.

45The FreeSoftware directory maintains a large database of free software packages.

46Some of the best-known examples include Linux Libra, Linux-based operating systems, the GNU Compiler Collection and C Library, the MySQL Relational Database, the Apache Web Server, and the SendMail Mail Transport Agent.

47Other influential examples include the Emacs Text Editor, the GIMP Raster Drawing and Image Editor, the X-Window System Graphical Display System, the LibreOffice Office Suite, and the Text and Latex typesetting systems.

48History From the 1950s up until the early 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the software freedoms associated with free software, which was typically public domain software.

49Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who welcomed the fact that people were making software that made their hardware useful.

50Organizations of users and suppliers, for example, share, were formed to facilitate exchange of software.

51As software was often written in an interpreted language such as BASIC, the source code was distributed to use these programs.

52Software was also shared and distributed as printed source code, type-in program, in computer magazines like Creative Computing, SoftSide, Compute, Byte, etc., and books like the best-seller BASIC computer games.

53By the early 1970s, the picture changed.

54Software costs were dramatically increasing.

55A growing software industry was competing with the hardware manufacturers' bundled software products, free in that the cost was included in the hardware cost.

56Lease machines required software support while providing no revenue for software.

57And some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of free software bundled with hardware product costs.

58In United States vs.

59IBM filed January 17, 1969, the government charged that bundled software was anti-competitive.

60While some software might always be free, there would henceforth be a growing amount of software produced primarily for sale.

61In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began using technical measures, such as only distributing binary copies of computer programs, to prevent computer users from being able to study or adapt the software applications as they saw fit.

62In 1980, copyright law was extended to computer programs.

63In 1983, Richard Stallman, one of the original authors of the popular EMAX program and a longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, announced the GNU project, the purpose of which was to produce a completely non-proprietary Unix-compatible operating system, saying that he had become frustrated with the shift in climate surrounding the computer world and its users.

64In his initial declaration of the project and its purpose, He specifically cited as a motivation his opposition to being asked to agree to non-disclosure agreements and restrictive licenses, which prohibited the free sharing of potentially profitable in-development software, a prohibition directly contrary to the traditional hacker ethic.

65Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation, FSF, was founded in October 1985.

66He developed a free software definition, and the concept of copyleft, designed to ensure software freedom for all.

67Some non-software industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development process.

68Scientists, 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 OpenCourse project, for instance.

69Creative Commons and the free culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement.

701980s Foundation of the GNU Project In 1983, Richard Stallman, longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 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.

71Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation, FSF, was founded in October 1985.

72An article outlining the project and its goals was published in March 1985 titled The GNU Manifesto.

73The manifesto included significant explanation of the GNU philosophy, free software definition, and copyleft ideas.

741990s Release of the Linux Kernel The Linux kernel, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991.

75The first license was a proprietary software license.

76However, with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License.

77Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted the attention of volunteer programmers.

78FreeBSD and NetBSD, Both derived from 386BSD, were released as free software when the USLV.

79The SDI lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993.

80OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995.

81Also in 1995, the Apache HTTP server, commonly referred to as Apache, was released under the Apache License 1.0.

82Licensing All free software licenses must grant users all the freedoms discussed above.

83However, unless the application's licenses are compatible, combining programs by mixing source code or directly linking binaries is problematic because of license technicalities.

84Programs indirectly connected together may avoid this problem.

85The majority of free software falls under a small set of licenses.

86The most popular of these licenses are The MIT License The GNU General Public License V2, GPL V2 The Apache License The GNU General Public License V3, GPL V3 The BSD License The GNU Lesser General Public License, LGPL The Mozilla Public License, MPL The Eclipse Public License 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.

87List of FSF-approved software licenses List of OSI-approved software licenses The FSF list is not prescriptive.

88Free software licenses can exist that the FSF has not heard about or considered important enough to write about.

89So, it is possible for a license to be free and not in the FSF list.

90The OSI list only lists licenses that have been submitted, considered, and approved.

91All open source licenses must meet the open source definition in order to be officially recognized as open source software.

92Free software, on the other hand, is a more informal classification that does not rely on official recognition.

93Nevertheless, software licensed under licenses that do not meet the free software definition cannot rightly be considered free software.

94Apart 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.

95Debian does not publish a list of approved licenses, so its judgments have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives.

96That is summarized at the Debian website.

97It is rare that a license announced as being in compliance with the FSF guidelines does not also meet the open source definition, although the reverse is not necessarily true.

98For example, the NASA open source agreement is an OSI-approved license, but non-free according to FSF.

99There are different categories of free software.

100Public domain software The copyright has expired.

101The work was not copyrighted.

102Released without copyright notice before 1988.

103Or the author has released the software onto the public domain with a waiver statement.

104In countries where this is possible.

105Since public domain software lacks copyright protection, it may be freely incorporated into any work, whether proprietary or free.

106The FSF recommends the CC0 public domain dedication for this purpose.

107Permissive licenses, also called BSD style because they are applied to much of the software distributed with the BSD operating systems.

108The author retains copyright solely to disclaim warranty and require proper attribution of modified works and permits redistribution and any modification, even closed source ones.

109Copy left licenses, with the GNU general public license being the most prominent.

110The author retains copyright and permits redistribution under the restriction that all such redistribution is licensed under the same license.

111Additions and modifications by others must also be licensed under the same copy left license whenever they are distributed with part of the original licensed product.

112This is also known as a viral, protective, or reciprocal license.

113Proponents of permissive and copy left licenses disagree on whether software freedom should be viewed as a negative or positive liberty.

114Due to their restrictions on distribution, not everyone considers copy left licenses to be free.

115Conversely, a permissive license may provide an incentive to create non-free software by reducing the cost of developing restricted software.

116Since this is incompatible with the spirit of software freedom, many people consider permissive licenses to be less free than copy left licenses.

117Security and reliability There is debate over the security of free software in comparison to proprietary software, with a major issue being security through obscurity.

118A popular quantitative test in computer security is to use relative counting of known unpatched security flaws.

119Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products that lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available.

120Free software advocates strongly believe that this methodology is biased by counting more vulnerabilities for the free software systems, since their source code is accessible and their community is more forthcoming about what problems exist as a part of full disclosure, and proprietary software systems can have undisclosed societal drawbacks, such as disenfranchising less fortunate would-be users of free programs.

121As users can analyze and trace the source code, many more people with no commercial constraints can inspect the code and find bugs and loopholes than a corporation would find practicable.

122According to Richard Stallman, user access to the source code makes deploying free software with undesirable hidden spyware functionality far more difficult than for proprietary software.

123Some quantitative studies have been done on the subject.

124Binary Blobs and Other Proprietary Software In 2006, OpenBSD started the first campaign against the use of binary blobs and kernels.

125Blobs are usually freely distributable device drivers for hardware from vendors that do not reveal driver source code to users or developers.

126This restricts the users' freedom effectively to modify the software and distribute modified versions.

127Also, since the blobs are undocumented and may have bugs, they pose a security risk to any operating system, whose kernel includes them.

128The 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.

129The issue of binary blobs in the Linux kernel and other device drivers motivated some developers in Ireland to launch GNU Sense, a Linux-based distribution with all the binary blobs removed.

130The project received support from the Free Software Foundation and stimulated the creation, headed by the Free Software Foundation Latin America, of the Linux Libra kernel.

131As of October 2012, Triskill is the most popular FSF-endorse Linux distribution ranked by DistroWatch, over 12 months.

132While Debian is not endorsed by the FSF and does not use Linux Libra, it is also a popular distribution available without kernel blobs by default since 2011.

133The Linux community uses the term blob to refer to all non-free firmware in a kernel, whereas OpenBSD uses the term to refer to device drivers.

134The FSF does not consider OpenBSD to be blob-free under the Linux community's definition of blob.

135Business Model Selling software under any free software license is permissible, as is commercial use.

136This is true for licenses with or without copyleft.

137Since free software may be freely redistributed, it is generally available at little or no fee.

138Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as customization, accompanying hardware, support, training, integration, or certification.

139Exceptions exist, however, where the user is charged to obtain a copy of the free application itself.

140Fees are usually charged for distribution on compact disks and bootable USB drives, or for services of installing or maintaining the operation of free software.

141Development of large, commercially used free software is often funded by a combination of user donations, crowdfunding, corporate contributions, and tax money.

142The SE Linux project at the United States National Security Agency is an example of a federally funded free software project.

143Proprietary software, on the other hand, tends to use a different business model, where a customer of the proprietary application pays a fee for a license to legally access and use it.

144This license may grant the customer the ability to configure some or no parts of the software themselves.

145Often 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.

146Some proprietary software vendors will also customize software for a fee.

147The Free Software Foundation encourages selling free software.

148As the foundation has written, distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development.

149Don't waste it.

150For example, the FSF's own recommended license, the GNU GPL, states that may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.

151Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated in 2001 that open source is not available to commercial companies.

152The way the license is written, if you use any open source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.

153This misunderstanding is based on a requirement of copyleft licenses, like the GPL, that if one distributes modified versions of software, they must release the source and use the same license.

154This requirement does not extend to other software from the same developer.

155The claim of incompatibility between commercial companies and free software is also a misunderstanding.

156There are several large companies, for example, Red Hat and IBM.

157IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, which do substantial commercial business in the development of free software.

158Economic aspects and adoption Free software played a significant part in the development of the internet, the world wide web, and the infrastructure of dot-com companies.

159Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use.

160Free software is a pure public good rather than a private good.

161Companies that contribute to free software increase commercial innovation.

162We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable, one that would give us in-house control.

163So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could.

164Official statement of the United Space Alliance, which manages the computer systems for the International Space Station, ISS, regarding their May 2013 decision to migrate ISS computer systems from Windows to Linux.

165The economic viability of free software has been recognized by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.

166Many 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.

167Most companies in the software business include free software in their commercial products if the licenses allow that.

168Free software is generally available at no cost and can result in permanently lower TCO, total cost of ownership, compared to proprietary software.

169With free software, businesses can fit software to their specific needs by changing the software themselves or by hiring programmers to modify it for them.

170Free software often has no warranty and, more importantly, generally does not assign legal liability to anyone.

171However, warranties are permitted between any two parties upon the condition of the software and its usage.

172Such an agreement is made separately from the free software license.

173A report by Standish Group estimates that adoption of free software has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year.

174Eric S.

175Raymond argued that the term free software is too ambiguous and intimidating for the business community.

176Raymond promoted the term open-source software as a friendlier alternative for the business and corporate world.

177This was the English Wikipedia article about free software as of December 4, 2024, narrated by AI-generated voice via the open-source software Sony Translate.

178Thank you.