Free software, software libre or libre software 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 and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is generally available without charge.

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 either is a "free software license", or a notice that the source code is released into the public domain.

The free software movement was conceived in 1983 by Richard Stallman to satisfy the need for and to give the benefit of "software freedom" to computer users. Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to provide the organizational structure to advance his Free Software ideas.

From 1998 onward, alternative terms for free software came into use. The most common are "software libre", "free and open source software" ("FOSS") and "free, libre and open source software" ("FLOSS"). The "Software Freedom Law Center" was founded in 2005 to protect and advance FLOSS. The antonym of free software is "proprietary software" or "non-free software". Commercial software may be either free software or proprietary software, contrary to a popular misconception that "commercial software" is a synonym for "proprietary software". (An example of commercial free software is Red Hat Linux.)

Free software, which may or may not be distributed free of charge, is distinct from "freeware" which, by definition, does not require payment for use. The authors or copyright holders of freeware may retain all rights to the software; it is not necessarily permissible to reverse engineer, modify, or redistribute freeware.

Since free software may be freely redistributed it is generally available at little or no cost. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as applications, 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 license in order to lawfully use a software product.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement.

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. Organizations of users and suppliers were formed to facilitate the exchange of software; see, for example, SHARE. By the late 1960s change was inevitable: 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 anticompetitive.^[5] While some software might always be free, there would be a growing amount of software that was for sale only. 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. 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.

The economic viability of free software has been recognised by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.^{[6][7][8][9][10]} 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, they state in a paper on Free Software philosophy, the latter term and the associated marketing campaign focuses on the technical issues of software development, avoiding the issue of user freedoms. "Libre" is used to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free" in English language.

Definition

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.

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run 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 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 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'".

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, 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 maintains a large database of free software packages. Some of the best-known examples include the Linux Kernel, the BSD and GNU/Linux operating systems, the GNU Compiler Collection and C library; the MySQL relational database; the Apache web server; and the Sendmail mail transport agent. Other influential examples include the emacs text editor; the GIMP raster drawing and image editor; the X Window System graphical-display system; the OpenOffice.org office suite; and the TeX and LaTeX typesetting 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 GNU General Public License
• the GNU Lesser General Public License
• the BSD License
• the Mozilla Public License
• the MIT License
• the Apache 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 licensees can exist which 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 licences must meet the Open Source Definition.

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.

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 Netscape Public License used for early versions of Mozilla and NASA Open Source Agreement are both OSI-approved licenses, but non-free according to FSF)

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 released the software onto the public domain. 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, and permits redistribution and any modification, 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 to use 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.

Free software advocates say 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,(This is called "Security Through Public Disclosure" by some) and proprietary software can have undisclosed flaws discoverable by or known to malicious users. 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. User access to the source code makes deploying free software with undesirable hidden spyware functionality far more difficult than for proprietary software.

Commercial viability and adoption

Free software played a part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of dot-com companies.^[19][20] 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 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.

Controversies

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.

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.

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 called 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.

Free software movement

The free software movement (abbreviated FSM) is a social movement which aims to promote user's rights to access and modify software. The alternative terms "software libre", "open source", and "FOSS" are associated with the free software movement. Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture, Richard Stallman is widely credited with launching the movement in 1983 by founding the GNU Project.

The free software philosophy at the core of the movement drew on core and incidental elements of what was called hacker culture by many computer users in the 1970s, among other sources.

Philosophy

Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement. The philosophy of the movement is to give freedom to computer users by replacing proprietary software under restrictive licensing terms with free software, with the ultimate goal of liberating everyone "in cyberspace" – that is, every computer user.

Members of the free software movement believe that all users of software should have the freedoms listed in the free software definition. Many hold that it is immoral to prohibit or prevent people from exercising these freedoms and that these freedoms are required to create a decent society where software users can help each other, and to have control over their computers.

Some adherents to the free software movement do not believe that proprietary software is strictly immoral. They argue freedom is valuable (both socially and pragmatically) as a property of software in its own right, separate from technical quality in a narrow sense.

The Free Software Foundation also believes all software needs free documentation (in particular because conscientious programmers should be able to update manuals to reflect modification that they made to the software), but deems the freedom to modify less important for other types of written works. Within the free software movement, the Floss manuals foundation specializes on the goal of providing such documentation. Members of the free software movement advocate that works which serve a practical purpose should also be free.

Actions

Writing and spreading free software

The initial work of the free software movement focused on software development.The free software movement also rejects proprietary software, refusing to install software that does not give them the freedoms of free software. According to Stallman, "The only thing in the software field that is worse than an unauthorised copy of a proprietary program, is an authorised copy of the proprietary program because this does the same harm to its whole community of users, and in addition, usually the developer, the perpetrator of this evil, profits from it."

Building awareness

Some supporters of the free software movement take up public speaking, or host a stall at software-related conferences to raise awareness of software freedom. This is seen as important since people who receive free software, but who are not aware that it is free software, will later accept a non-free replacement or will add software which is not free software.

Legislation

A lot of lobbying work has been done against software patents and expansions of copyright law.

The Venezuelan government implemented a free software law in January 2006. Decree No. 3,390 mandated all government agencies to migrate to free software over a two-year period.

Congressmen Dr Edgar David Villanueva and Jacques Rodrich Ackerman have been instrumental in introducing in Republic of Peru bill 1609 on "Free Software in Public Administration".The incident immediately invited the attention of Microsoft Inc, Peru, whose General Manager wrote a letter to Dr Edgar David Villanueva. Dr Villanueva's response received worldwide attention and is still seen as a classical piece of argumentation favouring use of Free Software in Governments.

In the USA, there have been efforts to pass legislation at the state level encouraging use of free software by state government agencies.

Internal conflict

Like many social movements, the free software movement has ongoing internal conflict between personalities and between supporters of compromise versus strict adherence to values.

Open source

In 1998, some companies met to create a marketing campaign for free software which would focus on technology rather than ethics. After this Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens, founded Open Source Initiative OSI, which promotes the term "open-source software" as an alternative term for free software. OSI does not agree with the free software movement's position that non-free software is a social problem or that it is unethical.

OSI advocates free software (under the name "open-source software") on the basis that it is a superior model for software development rather than it being a social or ethical issue. By 2005, Richard Glass considered the differences to be a "serious fracture" but "vitally important to those on both sides of the fracture" and "of little importance to anyone else studying the movement from a software engineering perspective" since they have had "little effect on the field".

Some free software advocates use the term Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as an inclusive compromise, drawing on both philosophies to bring both free software advocates and open source software advocates together to work on projects with more cohesion. Some users believe that a compromise term encompassing both aspects is ideal, to promote both the user's freedom with the software and also to promote the perceived superiority of an open source development model.

Stallman and Torvalds

The two most prominent people attached to the movement, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, have deep philosophical differences. This has fueled many dramatic news articles, but has not prevented Stallman from using Torvalds' kernel or Torvalds from using Stallman's GNU General Public License and the GNU operating system.

Measures of progress

Ohloh, a web service founded in 2004 and launched in 2006, monitors the development activity in the free software community, providing detailed metrics and quantitative analyses on the growth and popularity of projects and programming languages.

Criticism and controversy

Is something impeding progress?

Some, such as Eric Raymond, criticise the speed at which the free software movement is progressing, suggesting that temporary compromises should be made for long-term gains. Raymond argues that this could raise awareness of the software and thus increase the free software movement's influence on relevant standards and legislation.

Others, such as Richard Stallman, see the current level of compromise to be the bigger worry.

Prepared by BIJU P R, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, GOVT BRENNEN COLLEGE, THALASSERY