Skip to main content

Free Software

“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “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”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.

The four essential freedoms

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

 The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)
By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is non free. While we can distinguish various non free distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Bash Shell Script

Bash shell scripts in Linux are text files that contain a series of commands that can be executed by the Bash shell. Bash (Bourne Again Shell) is a popular shell in Linux and UNIX systems, and shell scripts are used to automate tasks, configure systems, or perform a sequence of operations. How to Write a Bash Shell Script Create a New File: You can create a new script using any text editor like nano , vim , or gedit . gedit myscript.sh Write the Script: A basic shell script begins with a "shebang" ( #!/bin/bash ) to specify the interpreter that will be used to execute the script. The rest of the file contains the commands to be run. Example of a simple script: #!/bin/bash # This is a comment echo "Hello, World!" # Print "Hello, World!" #!/bin/bash : Specifies that the script will be executed using the Bash shell. echo "Hello, World!" : A command that prints the string "Hello, World!" to the terminal. Comments: Any line starting ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Basic Linux Commands For Beginner's

Basic Linux Commands for Beginners Linux is an Operating System’s Kernel. You might have heard of UNIX. Well, Linux is a UNIX clone. But it was actually created by Linus Torvalds from Scratch. Linux is free and open-source, that means that you can simply change anything in Linux and redistribute it in your own name! There are several Linux Distributions, commonly called “distros”. A few of them are: Mint Ubuntu Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux Debian Fedora Kali Linux is Mainly used in Servers. About 90% of the Internet is powered by Linux Servers. This is because Linux is fast, secure, and free! The main problem of using Windows Servers are their cost. This is solved by using Linux Servers. Forgot to mention, the OS that runs in about 80% of the Smartphones in the World, Android, is also made from the Linux Kernel. Yes, Linux is amazing! A simple example of its security is that most of the viruses in the world run on Windows, but not on Linux...
4 comments
Read more

Linux History and GNU

Linus Torvalds ,a student at the University of Helsinki started developing Linux to create a system similar to MINIX, a UNIX operating system. In 1991 he released version 0.02; Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel, the core of the operating system, was released in 1994. About the same time, American software developer Richard Stallman and the FSF made efforts to create an open-source UNIX-like operating system called GNU. In contrast to Torvalds, Stallman and the FSF started by creating utilities for the operating system first. These utilities were then added to the Linux kernel to create a complete system called GNU/Linux, or, less precisely, just Linux. Linus Torvalds Richard Stallman Linux grew throughout the 1990s because of the efforts of hobbyist developers. Although Linux is not as user-friendly as the popular Microsoft Windows and Mac OS operating systems, it is an efficient and reliable system that rarely crashes. Combined with Apache, an open-source Web server, Linux accounts fo...
Post a Comment
Read more