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Free software or libre 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. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all 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.Selling Free Software
(gnu.org)
Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices. The right to study and modify a computer program entails that source code—the preferred format for making changes—be made available to users of that program. While 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. Although the term "free software" had already been used loosely in the past and other permissive software like the
Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
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.


Context

Free software thus differs from: * proprietary software, such as Microsoft Office, Windows,
Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...
,
Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...
or iMessage from
Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...
. Users cannot study, change, and share their source code. * freeware, which is a category of proprietary software that does not require payment for basic use. For software under the purview of
copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
to be free, it must carry a software license whereby the author grants users the aforementioned rights. Software that is not covered by copyright law, such as software in the public domain, is free as long as the source code is in the public domain too, or otherwise available without restrictions. Proprietary software uses restrictive software licences or EULAs and usually does not provide users with the source code. Users are thus legally or technically prevented from changing the software, and this results in reliance on the publisher to provide updates, help, and support. (''See also vendor lock-in and abandonware''). Users often may not reverse engineer, modify, or redistribute proprietary software. Beyond copyright law, contracts and 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 Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. ...
(more specifically, tivoization). Free software can be a for-profit, commercial activity or not. Some free software is developed by volunteer computer programmers while other is developed by corporations; or even by both.


Naming and differences with open source

Although 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. According 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. Stallman 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. The FSF also notes that "Open Source" has exactly one specific meaning in common English, namely that "you can look at the source code." It 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". The loan adjective " libre" is often used to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free" in
English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to t ...
, and the ambiguity with the older usage of "free software" as public-domain software. (''See Gratis versus libre.'')


Definition and the Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software

The first formal definition of free software was published by FSF in February 1986. 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. The numbering begins with zero, not only as a spoof on the common usage of zero-based numbering in programming languages, but also because "Freedom 0" was not initially included in the list, but later added first in the list as it was considered very important. * Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose. * Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. * Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor. * Freedom 3: 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 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible. 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, the Free Software Foundation says: "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. (''See Gratis versus libre.'') In the late 1990s, other groups published their own definitions that 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 FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...
,
OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project em ...
, and
NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...
, 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 Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
as restrictive. They generally advocate
permissive free software license A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free software, free-software software license, license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be us ...
s, which allow others to use the software as they wish, without being legally ''forced'' to provide the source code. Their view is that this permissive approach is more free. The Kerberos, X11, and
Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño a ...
software licenses are substantially similar in intent and implementation.


Examples

There are thousands of free applications and many operating systems available on the Internet. Users can easily download and install those applications via a package manager that comes included with most Linux distributions. The Free Software Directory maintains a large database of free-software packages. Some of the best-known examples include the
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
, the BSD and Linux operating systems, the GNU Compiler Collection and C library; the MySQL relational database; the
Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño a ...
web server; and the Sendmail mail transport agent. Other influential examples include the
Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...
text editor; the
GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized task ...
raster drawing and image editor; the X Window System graphical-display system; the LibreOffice office suite; and the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems.


History

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. Software 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. Organizations of users and suppliers, for example, SHARE, were formed to facilitate exchange of software. As software was often written in an interpreted language such as
BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
, the source code was distributed to use these programs. Software was also shared and distributed as printed source code ( Type-in program) in computer magazines (like ''
Creative Computing ''Creative Computing'' was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format th ...
'', '' SoftSide'', '' Compute!'', '' Byte'', etc.) and books, like the bestseller '' BASIC Computer Games''. By the early 1970s, the picture changed: software costs were dramatically increasing, a growing software industry was competing with the hardware manufacturer's bundled software products (free in that the cost was included in the hardware cost), leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of "free" software bundled with hardware product costs. In ''United States vs. IBM'', filed January 17, 1969, the government charged that bundled software was anti-competitive. While some software might always be free, there would henceforth be a growing amount of software produced primarily for sale. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began using technical measures (such as only distributing binary copies of
computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer progra ...
s) to prevent computer users from being able to study or adapt the software applications as they saw fit. In 1980,
copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
law was extended to computer programs. In 1983, Richard Stallman, one of the original authors of the popular
Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...
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. In 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 agreement A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a legal contract or part of a contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties wish to share with one another for certain purposes, but wish ...
s and restrictive licenses which prohibited the free sharing of potentially profitable in-development software, a prohibition directly contrary to the traditional hacker ethic. 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 Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
", designed to ensure ''software freedom'' for all. 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 Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
licenses (''see the OpenCores project, for instance'').
Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
and the free-culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement.


1980s: 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. Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. An article outlining the project and its goals was published in March 1985 titled the '' GNU Manifesto''. The manifesto included significant explanation of the GNU philosophy, '' Free Software Definition'' and "
copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
" ideas.


1990s: Release of the Linux kernel

The
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. The first licence was a proprietary software licence. However, with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the
GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...
. Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted the attention of volunteer programmers.
FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...
and
NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...
(both derived from
386BSD 386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a discontinued Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was released in 1992 and ran on PC-compatible computer systems based on the 32-bit Intel 80386 microprocessor. 386BSD inn ...
) were released as free software when the '' USL v. BSDi'' lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993.
OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project em ...
forked from NetBSD in 1995. Also in 1995, The
Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Soft ...
, commonly referred to as Apache, was released under the Apache License 1.0.


Licensing

All free-software licenses must grant users 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 falls under a small set of licenses. The most popular of these licenses are: * The MIT License * The GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) * The Apache License * The GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3) * 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: * List of FSF approved software licenses * List of OSI approved software licenses The FSF list is not prescriptive: free-software licenses can exist that the FSF has not heard about, or considered important enough to write about. So it's possible for a license to be free and not in the FSF list. The OSI list only lists licenses that have been submitted, considered and approved. All open-source licenses must meet the Open Source Definition in order to be officially recognized as open source software. Free software, on the other hand, is a more informal classification that does not rely on official recognition. Nevertheless, software licensed under licenses that do not meet the Free Software Definition cannot rightly be considered free software. Apart from these two organizations, the
Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...
project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian does not publish a list of 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. It 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 (for example, the NASA Open Source Agreement is an OSI-approved license, but non-free according to FSF). There are different categories of free software. * Public-domain software: the copyright has expired, the work was not copyrighted (released without copyright notice before 1988), or the author has released the software onto the public domain with a waiver statement (in countries where this is possible). Since public-domain software lacks copyright protection, it may be freely incorporated into any work, whether proprietary or free. The FSF recommends the CC0 public domain dedication for this purpose. *
Permissive licenses A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...
, also called BSD-style because they are applied to much of the software distributed with the BSD operating systems: many of these licenses are also known as copyfree as they have no restrictions on distribution. The author retains copyright solely to disclaim warranty and require proper attribution of modified works, and permits redistribution and modification, even closed-source ones. In this sense, a permissive license provides an incentive to create non-free software, by reducing the cost of developing restricted software. Since this is incompatible with the spirit of software freedom, many people consider permissive licenses to be less free than copyleft licenses. *
Copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
licenses, with the
GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...
being the most prominent: the author retains copyright and permits redistribution under the restriction that 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. This is also known as a ''viral'', '' protective'', or ''reciprocal'' license. Due to the restriction on distribution not everyone considers this type of license to be free.


Security and reliability

There is debate over the
security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social ...
of free software in comparison to proprietary software, with a major issue being security through obscurity. A popular quantitative test in computer security is to use relative counting of known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products that lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available. Free 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, (This is called "Security Through Disclosure") and proprietary software systems can have undisclosed societal drawbacks, such as disenfranchising less fortunate would-be users of free programs. As users can analyse 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. According 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. Some quantitative studies have been done on the subject.


Binary blobs and other proprietary software

In 2006,
OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project em ...
started the first campaign against the use of
binary blob In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source ope ...
s in kernels. Blobs are usually freely distributable
device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and ot ...
s for hardware from vendors that do not reveal driver source code to users or developers. This restricts the users' freedom effectively to modify the software and distribute modified versions. Also, since the blobs are undocumented and may have
bugs Bugs may refer to: * Plural of bug Arts, entertainment and media Fictional characters * Bugs Bunny, a character * Bugs Meany, a character in the ''Encyclopedia Brown'' books Films * ''Bugs'' (2003 film), a science-fiction-horror film * ''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 The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
and other device drivers motivated some developers in Ireland to launch gNewSense, a Linux based distribution with all the binary blobs removed. The project received support from the Free Software Foundation and stimulated the creation, headed by the Free Software Foundation Latin America, of the Linux-libre kernel. As of October 2012, Trisquel is the most popular FSF endorsed Linux distribution ranked by Distrowatch (over 12 months). While
Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...
is not endorsed by the FSF and does not use Linux-libre, it is also a popular distribution available without kernel blobs by default since 2011.


Business model

Selling software under any free-software licence is permissible, as is commercial use. This is true for licenses with or without
copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
. Since free software may be freely redistributed, it is generally available at little or no fee. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as customization, accompanying hardware, support, training, integration, or certification. Exceptions exist however, where the user is charged to obtain a copy of the free application itself. Fees are usually charged for distribution on compact discs and bootable USB drives, or for services of installing or maintaining the operation of free software. Development of large, commercially used free software is often funded by a combination of user donations,
crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...
, corporate contributions, and tax money. The SELinux project at the United States National Security Agency is an example of a federally funded free-software project. Proprietary 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. 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. The Free Software Foundation encourages selling free software. As the Foundation has written, "distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!". For example, the FSF's own recommended license (the
GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...
) states that " oumay charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee." Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer Steven Anthony Ballmer (; March 24, 1956) is an American business magnate and investor who served as the chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Associ ...
stated in 2001 that "open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." This misunderstanding is based on a requirement of
copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
licenses (like the GPL) that if one distributes modified versions of software, they must release the source and use the same license. This requirement does not extend to other software from the same developer. The claim of incompatibility between commercial companies and free software is also a misunderstanding. There are several large companies, e.g.
Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...
and IBM (IBM acquired RedHat in 2019), which do substantial commercial business in the development of free software.


Economic 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. Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use; free software is a
pure public good In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)Oakland, W. H. (1987). Theory of public goods. In Handbook of public economics (Vol. 2, pp. 485-535). Elsevier. is a good that is both non-excludable and non-ri ...
rather than a private good. Companies that contribute to free software increase commercial innovation. The economic viability of free software has been recognized by large corporations such as IBM,
Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...
, and
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
. 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. Most companies in the software business include free software in their commercial products if the licenses allow that. Free software is generally available at no cost and can result in permanently lower TCO 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 estimates that adoption of free software has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year.
Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...
argued that the term ''free software'' is too ambiguous and intimidating for the business community. Raymond promoted the term '' open-source software'' as a friendlier alternative for the business and corporate world.


See also

* Definition of Free Cultural Works * Digital rights * Free content * Libre knowledge * List of formerly proprietary software * List of free software project directories * List of free software for Web 2.0 Services * Open format *
Open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition ...
*
Open-source hardware Open-source hardware (OSH) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movement and a ...
* Outline of free software * :Free software lists and comparisons * Appropriate Technology *
Sustainable Development Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...


Notes


References


Further reading


Puckette, Miller. "Who Owns our Software?: A first-person case study." eContact (September 2009). Montréal: CEC

Hancock, Terry. "The Jargon of Freedom: 60 Words and Phrases with Context". Free Software Magazine. 2010-20-24
*


External links

{{Authority control Software licenses Applied ethics