Free software
Free software or
software libre 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. 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.The
free software movement was conceived in 1983 by
Richard Stallman to make these freedoms available to every computer user.
(1) From the late 1990s onward,
alternative terms for free software came into use. "
Open source software" is the most common such alternative term. Others include "software libre", "
free and open source software" ("FOSS") and "free, libre and open-source software" ("FLOSS"). The antonym of free software is "
proprietary software" or "non-free software".{{Fact|date=August 2008}}Free software is distinct from "
freeware" which is
proprietary software made available free of charge. 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 paying for a licence in order to lawfully use a software product.
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 using technical measures (such as only distributing
binary copies of
computer programs) to prevent
computer users from being able to study and modify software.
(2). In 1980
copyright law was extended to computer programs.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. 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.
missing image!
- Portrait - Denmark DTU 2007-3-31.jpg -
Richard Stallman at DTU in Denmark 31 March 2007
Free software is a widespread international concept, 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.{{Fact|date=July 2008}} 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.
(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.
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 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'".
(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 BSD-based operating systems, such as
FreeBSD,
OpenBSD, and
NetBSD, do not have their own formal definitions of free software. Users of these systems generally find the same set of software to be acceptable, but sometimes see copyleft as restrictive. They generally advocate
permissive free software licenses, which allow others to make software based on their source code, and then release the modified result as proprietary software. 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 wide technology transfer (
University of California,
MIT, and
UIUC).
Examples of free software
The
Free Software Directory is a free software project that maintains a large database of free software packages.
Notable free software
Compilers and interpretters
The tools needed to turn human-written source code into machine-executable programs are called compilers or interpretters. For some languages, such as
C,
C++,
Fortran,
Tcl,
Java, and
Pascal (programming language), there are free and non-free compilers. For other languages, there is just one (or primarily one) compiler, and it is free software. This is the case for
Perl,
PHP,
Python,
Lua, and
Ruby.
Servers
Operating systems
Free software licenses
All free software licenses must grant people all the freedoms discussed above. 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.
These lists are necessarily incomplete, because a license need not be known by either organization in order to provide these freedoms.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 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.
Permissive and copyleft licenses
The FSF categorizes licenses in the following ways:
- Public domain software - the copyright has expired, the work was not copyrighted or the author has abandoned the copyright. Since public-domain software lacks copyright protection, it may be freely incorporated into any work, whether proprietary or free.
- Permissive licenses, also called BSD-style because they are applied to much of the software distributed with the BSD operating systems. The author retains copyright solely to disclaim warranty and require proper attribution of modified works, but permits redistribution and modification in any work, even proprietary ones.
- Copyleft licenses, the GNU General Public License being the most prominent. The author retains copyright and permits redistribution and modification provided all such redistribution is licensed under the same license. Additions and modifications by others must also be licensed under the same 'copyleft' license whenever they are distributed with part of the original licensed product.
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. 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.
(9)David A. Wheeler has published research concluding that free software is quantitatively more reliable than proprietary software.
(10) Adoption
Free software played a part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of
dot-com companies.
(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. Companies that contribute to free software can increase commercial
innovation amidst the void of
patent cross licensing lawsuits. (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. 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. 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.A report by
Standish Group says that adoption of
open source has caused a drop in revenue to the
proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year.
(13) Controversies
Binary blobs
In 2006,
OpenBSD started the first campaign against the use of
binary blobs, in
kernels. Blobs are usually freely distributable
device drivers for hardware from vendors that do not reveal driver source code to users or developers. 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. 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. The project received support from the
Free Software Foundation(14) BitKeeper
Larry McVoy invited high-profile free software projects to use his proprietary
versioning system,
BitKeeper, free of charge, in order to attract paying users. 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. This controversial decision drew criticism from several sources, including the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman.
(15)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.
Patent deals
In November 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.
(16) See also
References
-
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[WEB,weblink Appendix "History" of Why OSS/FS, Look at the Numbers!, David A. Wheeler]| , |
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[WEB,weblink GNU's Bulletin, Volume 1 Number 1, page 8]
}
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[{{cite web,weblink The Free Software Definition, Free Software Foundation, 2007-04-22, ]
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[WEB, Bruce Perens,weblink Debian's "Social Contract" with the Free Software Community, debian-announce mailing list}]
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[{{cite web,weblink Debian -- License information, 2008-01-08, ]
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[WEB,weblink Transcript where Stallman explains about spyware, ]
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[WEB,weblink High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS)... with Lots on Formal Methods, David A. Wheeler, ]
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[WEB,weblink Web Server Usage Survey, Netcraft, ]
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[WEB,weblink Apache Strategy in the New Economy, The Apache Software Foundation, ]
- weblink
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[GNU/Linux distributions we know of which consist entirely of free software, and whose main distribution sites distribute only free software.]
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[WEB, Richard Stallman thanking Larry McVoy for ending the gratis licenses for BitKeeper,weblink NewsForge, ]
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External links
{{wikinewscat|FLOSS}}
{{software distribution}}{{FOSS}}
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