Free Software

"Free Software is a set of principles designed to protect the freedom of individuals to use computer software. It emerged in the 1980s against a backdrop of increasing restrictions on the use and production of software. Free Software can therefore be understood historically and ethically as the defence of freedom against a genuine threat."

- Rob Myers [1]

Definition

The term free software is defined by the Free Software Foundation at http://www.fsf.org/.

From the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software:

"Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. Freedom from such restrictions is central to the concept, with the opposite of free software being proprietary software (a distinction unrelated to whether a fee is charged). The usual way for software to be distributed as free software is for the software to be licensed to the recipient with a free software license (or be in the public domain), and the source code of the software to be made available (for a compiled language)." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)

Discussion

Richard Stallman on the difference between free software and Open Source Software

"Some of the proponents of “open source” considered it a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by citing practical benefits, while avoiding the [gratis interpretation and sidelining the ethics and social value of a free hacker culture]. Other proponents flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for “open source” they did not cite or advocate those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with the practice of citing only practical values, such as making powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of “open source” have come to it since then, and that practice is what they take it to mean.

Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution." (http://communities.libre.org/philosophy/saylibre)

How is Free Software related to Open Source?, see at http://www.anat.org.au/stillopen/blog/2007/08/19/open-source-ideologies/

The term Open Source is defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Key Books to Read

1. Decoding Liberation

More Information

See our entry on the Free Software Principles and visit the site of the Free Software Foundation

The vision of Oekonux on free software is here at http://www.oekonux.org/introduction/blotter/

Rob Myers keeps a directory of Free Software Applications at http://robmyers.org/wiki/index.php/Free_Software_Applications

David Wheeler maintains a reference page on Free Software and Open Source Software.