Portal:Free software

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THE FREE SOFTWARE PORTAL

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Free software is software which can be run, studied, examined, modified, and redistributed by everyone who has a copy. This type of software, which was given its current name in 1983, has also come to be known as "open-source software", "software libre" or "libre software", "FOSS", and "FLOSS". The term "Free" refers to it being unfettered, rather than being free-of-charge. In this sense, it is the user who is free.

The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary tactic to write free software replacements for the non-free software that society relied on. Examples of well-known free software packages include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org and on network servers, FreeBSD, Samba, and the Apache web server.

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Freenet is a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store originally designed by Ian Clarke. Freenet aims to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network with strong protection of anonymity. Freenet works by pooling the contributed bandwidth and storage space of member computers to allow users to anonymously publish or retrieve various kinds of information. It can be thought of as a large storage device which uses key based routing similar to a distributed hash table to locate peers' data. When a file is stored in Freenet, a key which can be used to retrieve the file is generated. The storage space is distributed among all connected nodes on Freenet.

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Terminology

Although there was free software before this date, the term "free software" was coined in 1983 by Richard Stallman, and was used by Stallman's Free Software Foundation and defined by their Free Software Definition. Similar definitions were later published, such as the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Additionally, informal definitions exist within the BSD-based operating system communities, the main divergence being that they disagree with the use of copyleft.

In 1998 Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond began a campaign to market free software under the replacement label "open-source software". To this end they founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

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