History
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the freedoms that are provided by free software. 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. 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 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,[citation needed] 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. Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. He developed a free software definition and the concept of "copyleft", designed to ensure software freedom for all.
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. Completely free computing environments are available as large packages of basic system software such as the many GNU/Linux distributions and FreeBSD. Free software developers have also created free versions of almost all commonly used desktop applications, including Web browsers, office productivity suites, and multimedia players. 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. 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.
The economic viability of free software has been recognised by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. 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). Creative Commons and the free culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement.
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."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.
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.[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:
Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code is highly impractical.
Thus, free software means that computer users have the freedom to cooperate with whom they choose, and to control the software they use. 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. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'".
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,and the Open Source Definition, published in 1998.
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. 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. All of these software packages originated in academic institutions interested in the widest possible technology transfer (University of California, MIT, and UIUC).
Examples of free software
Main articles: List of open source software packages, Portal:Free software/Categories, and :Category:Free software
The Free Software Directory is a free software project that maintains a large database of free software packages.
Notable free software
GUI related
X Window System
GNOME
KDE
Xfce desktop environments
OpenOffice.org
office suite, Mozilla and Firefox web browsers.
Typesetting and document preparation systems
TeX
LaTeX
Graphics tools like GIMP image graphics editor and Blender 3D animation program.
Text editors like vi or emacs.
ogg is a free software multimedia container, used to hold ogg vorbis sound and ogg theora video.
Relational database systems
MySQL
PostgreSQL
GCC compilers, GDB debugger and the GNU C Library.
Programming languages
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Lua
Ruby
Tcl
Servers
Apache web server
BIND name server
Sendmail mail transport
Samba file server.
Operating systems
GNU/Linux
BSD
Darwin
OpenSolaris
