Difference between revisions of "Free software movement"
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Revision as of 17:06, July 24, 2014
The free software movement advocates the creation and sharing of free software (compare open source).
Software genius, GNU pioneer and Communist Richard Stallman defines free software as respecting the "essential freedoms" to:
- Run the program for any purpose
- Study how the software works and modify it to meet your needs
- Distribute copies of the software
- Publish modifications to the software
In order to fulfill these requirements access to the source code is essential, so free software is a type of open source software. The right to distribute the software may be subject to a clause that ensures that future recipients of the software have the same freedoms.
Stallman and his Free Software Foundation created the General Public License, which grants the user specific rights that are not typically granted for proprietary software.
Examples of free software are the Linux operating system and the Apache web server, which this very site runs on.
Liberal Bias
The Free Software Movement shows a liberal bias by effectively requiring Communism. It seeks to replace the free market of software with common ownership of all programs. The Free Software Movement also advocates for viral licenses, which force other entities to support the Free Software Movement by preventing compatibility with proprietary software. Such licenses are therefore effectively an example of Totalitarianism, but with the government replaced by an inert license.
Free software and Open Source software
Stallman wrote:
- The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. [1]
Links
Articles by Richard Stallman:
