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In defense of Free Software, community, and cooperation | Tom Chance's website   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05) In these communities, the benefits of being able to share software, to customise or have customised software for their particular needs, and to be free as a community from the influence of any particular software producers is a great opportunity. It humanises software, and takes the user from being a passive consumer who must put up with what he is given to being a potentially active user who can exercise a degree of power over what he is given, both in terms of actually changing particular features, and in terms of influencing the development agenda. Community matters, more in fact than considerations of stability and cost, because in the long term, whilst Free Software will enable communities and deliver the quality of products citizen-consumers require, proprietary software will further divide and polarise communities and inhibit the potential of information technology for the public. tom.acrewoods.net /writing/free-sw-community   (1462 words)

FSF - The Free Software Foundation Read more about free software in our essays section, in the philosophy section of gnu.org, and in the pages of the independently published Free Software Magazine. Today the GNU GPL is the most widely used Free Software license, and as its author, the FSF works to help the wider community use and comprehend it. The Free Software Directory was started in September 1999 to catalog all useful free software that runs under free operating systems. www.fsf.org   (605 words)

Free software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The usual way for software to be distributed as free software is for the software to be licensed to the recipient with a free software license (or be in the public domain), and the source code of the software to be made available (for a compiled language). Software that is not free software is known as proprietary software. Free software is generally available at little to no cost and can result in permanently lower costs compared to proprietary software, evidence by free software becoming popular in third world countries. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Free_software   (2798 words)

The Free World Licence Software released under The Free World Licence cannot be used (under the licence) on proprietary platforms such as Windows NT and Solaris. The purpose of The Free World Licence is to provide a means for commercial software vendors to contribute their software to the free software community and experiment with free software business models without threatening the proprietary-platform sales that underwrite their survival. The licence achieves this by restricting use of the software to free platforms only, a mechanism that is largely successful in separating hackers from suits because of the almost-exclusive use of free platforms by the free software community and the extremely high use of proprietary platforms by the corporate community. www.freeworldlicence.org   (290 words)

Free Software Business Strategy Guide A Free Software business is a company which does not exist solely to earn as much money as possible without incurring unacceptable risks; it's a company where contributing to the development and improvement of Free Software, and upholding the principles of the Free Software movement, are among the basic values of the company. The patent holder has the option of publishing a Free Software implementation of the technology, which may lead to more widespread use of the patented technology, and thereby to greater royalties revenue from companies that use the technology in proprietary software. Since Richard Stallman's announcement of the GNU project in 1983, there is a Free Software movement which holds that it is ethically and morally wrong to deny software users access to the source code of the programs they use, or to disallow making improvements and sharing them. www.freestrategy.info   (7820 words)

RIP The Free Software Community   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05) Yes, it's a wonderful service to free software, and appears to be quite open to all legitimate users, but at the end of the day, it's owned by a publicly traded corporation, who after all wouldn't be running the site if it weren't to their business advantage. That 'free software sites' were being jammed with nothing but hits from Windows boxes by people who were interested in having the social 'cool value' of being associated with the community without any of the effort. Slashdot community is not by any means free software community ("news for nerds" not "news for free software zealots") so no claims about quality or behaviour of slashdot community bear any relation to free software community. www.advogato.org /article/119.html   (7496 words)

NewsForge | The Free Software Community After 20 Years: With great but incomplete success, what now?   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05) Free software does not mean "gratis"; it means that users are free to run the program, study the source code, change it, and redistribute it either with or without changes, either gratis or for a fee. The free software development movement has not just been about developing software to freely use and share, it also had to re-create a new basis for this to happen, which for good or bad, had to be very distinct from what the existing software world had evolved into. The free software revolution will be over when most end users (individuals as well as institutions) refuse to pay for software that is not free. www.newsforge.com /software/04/01/05/1146229.shtml   (5381 words)

Philosophy of the GNU Project - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software Patents and Literary Patents, by Richard M. Stallman, speaking of patenting artistic techniques, US patent (6,935,954) covers making game characters start to hallucinate when (according to the game) they are being driven insane. Copyright versus community in the age of computer networks: is a verbatim transcript of a talk by Richard Stallman at the Logiciel Libre Conference in July 2000. www.gnu.org /philosophy/philosophy.html   (3125 words)

The GNU Operating system - the GNU project - Free Software Foundation - Free as in Freedom - GNU/Linux Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project. If you use Free Software in your business, you can also consider corporate patronage or a deluxe distribution of GNU software as a way to support the FSF. www.gnu.org   (659 words)

Free software movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Moreover, they may use the term "free software" to distance themselves from claims that "open source" software is always technically superior to proprietary software. Their basic disagreement with the Free Software Foundation is its blanket condemnation of proprietary software. The free software movement also believes all software needs free documentation, but does not take a strong position on other types of works. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Free_software_movement   (503 words)

Philosophies of Free Software and Intellectual Property   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05) The software itself isn't everything, though: there's also the proliferation of news and discussion sites related to Linux or free software, and an increase in the number of miscellaneous papers such as the Halloween documents. He firmly believes that the self-confessed "fight fire with fire" nature of the GPL is necessary to the cause of free software. When writing a software license, the whole question of software licensing may be the foremost moral issue in your mind, but there's no particular reason to single it out and incorporate it into the language of the license. www.nutters.org /docs/free-software-philosophy   (10552 words)

NewsForge | In defense of Free Software, community, and cooperation The Free Software movement is most definitely a valid one, but Stallman is building a religion that many of us find repulsive. Even software that has a political or philosphical purpose has to do something useful for someone, and therein lies the problem for the authors of those programs: when the software is used for what it does and not what it means. In my opinion, non-entertainment software (entertainment software should entertain, and is more like a novel or song in that respect) is nothing more than a fancy hammer, screw-driver, pick, or shovel: it is a tool to do something for the user. www.newsforge.com /software/04/01/07/1650217.shtml?tid=132&tid=150&tid=82   (3049 words)

LWN: 321 Studios and the free software community It is a living demonstration of one of the free software community's deepest fears: that software patents will be used to prevent us from programming our computers to work the way we want them to. The real answer, perhaps, is that the community has sensed that 321 Studios does not really share its values; 321 appears to have little interest in any issues beyond immediate sales of DVD copying software. But, while 321 is fighting many of the same battles as the free software community, it is fighting them as part of a different war. lwn.net /Articles/71198   (1627 words)

SoftwareFor.org: Free Software for You   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05) By providing a tool that makes their great free software more accessible to software-hungry students from Boston to Bangalore, we feel we've given a little back to the free software community and to students all over the world. These programs are free to copy and distribute because they were made by volunteers in the open source and free software community and released under the GPL or a similar license. For more information on what open source and free software is, please visit the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation. mirror.softwarefor.org   (580 words)

Sun 'distorts' definition of free software - ZDNet UK News But, the definition of free in FOSS is widely accepted to refer to the freedom of software, rather than its cost. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that Schwartz has missed the point on what both the free software and open source movements are about. The four freedoms free software provides are; the freedom to run the software as you wish, the freedom to study the source code and modify it to do what you wish, the freedom to make and redistribute copies, and the freedom to publish modified versions." news.zdnet.co.uk /software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39206659,00.htm   (755 words)

Free Software   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05) This usage of the name "Free Software" was common in the Unix world and recently introduced to the general computer community. Free Software is also referred to as Freed Software, Liberated Software (software libre) or FRS (freely redistributable software). The precise meaning of Free Software is spelled out in the Debian Free Software Guidelines or the Free Software Definition while Open Source is defined officially by the Open Source Definition. www.free-soft.org   (530 words)

Appendix 8: What is Free Software The following definition of Free Software is copyright © 1997 "Software in the Public Interest" and is printed here with the author's permission. The software in these directories is not part of the Debian system, although it has been configured for use with Debian. The concept of a Linux distribution stating its "social contract with the free software community" was suggested to me by Ean Schussler. people.debian.org /~psg/ddg/node170.html   (867 words)

Free Software Magazine Free Software Magazine is now available in print from Lulu.com. Free Software Magazine is the free online magazine about free software. Miller came close to correctly identifying a core issue, which is that the proprietary software business model as it exists today both facilitates and encourages vendors to act in bad faith. www.freesoftwaremagazine.com   (1708 words)

Debian Social Contract The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) part of the contract, initially designed as a set of commitments that we agree to abide by, has been adopted by the free software community as the basis of the Open Source Definition. The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. This document was drafted by Bruce Perens, refined by the other Debian developers during a month-long e-mail conference in June 1997, and then accepted as the publicly stated policy of the Debian Project. www.debian.org /social_contract.html   (983 words)

Welcome to RON's Datacom Co., Ltd. - the leading company supports free software community in China!   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05) The "free" in "Free Software" refers "freedom", it is not the "free" in "free of charge". The "free" in "Free Software" refers the "freedom" (- a part of human rights), it is NOT related with price which is often misunderstood as "free" in "free of charge". Also, the term "Free Software" came from GNU Project started in 1984, when the term "open sources software" was not invented yet. www.free-soft.org /FSM/english/issue01   (312 words)

LXer: This week at LWN: Behavioral standards in the free software community Free Software Magazine is a magazine entirely dedicated to free software. The GNOME community has recently started a discussion on the adoption of a code of conduct for community members. The free software community is traditionally an open and unregulated group. lxer.com /module/newswire/view/62681/index.html   (400 words)

FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). We catalog useful free software that runs under free operating systems — particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants. Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. directory.fsf.org   (447 words)

Keeping Free Software Free The GNU GPL, of all the free software licenses, is the one that most fully embodies the values and aims of the free software movement by ensuring four fundamental freedoms for every user. Some refer to free software as "open source," that being the catchphrase of an amoral approach to the matter which cites powerful and reliable software as the highest goal. For the goals of freedom and community, the goals of the free software movement, this concession would amount to failure. www.businessweek.com /technology/content/mar2006/tc20060328_903602.htm   (1363 words)

LWN: Behavioral standards in the free software community The community as a whole may well want to think about how people interact, and how that interaction can be made more pleasant and more globally inclusive. In a community like LKML, it seems that people being mean are either tolerated because of their history and value, or they do a very effective job in isolating themselves and reducing their own value and trust from the community. The free software community has a pretty strong social divide, although the criteria by which people are discriminated are different than in the normal society. lwn.net /Articles/186265   (4893 words)

PayThyme Open Source Linux Payroll - Free Software Payroll Community Site PayThyme is the first Open Source UK statutory payroll, and has been developed by Clockwork Software Systems, who also provide payroll support and other services, and develop other business applications. PayThyme is an Open Source UK statutory payroll software package and runs on Linux; full payroll support is available from the authors - Clockwork - and you can find details of this, together with information on PayThyme payroll features and functionality, at http://www.paythyme.com. The general Clockwork web site is at http://www.clocksoft.co.uk and has details of our range of software products, software development and integration services, training courses and consultancy services. www.paythyme.org.uk   (618 words)

Community Free Software Group CFSG is a not-for-profit organization serving individuals, groups and communities through Free Software education and implementation. As we begin our third year we look forward to continued development of new Free Software programs serving more locations, and thank Stephen Lynch for his leadership during the previous year. January 2004 -- CFSG attends the grand opening of the new Asian Americans for Equality Community Center and Residence at 111 Norfolk Street, New York. www.cfsg.org   (575 words)

FSF Europe - Free Software Foundation Europe The FSF Europe was launched on 10 March 2001 and supports all European aspects of Free Software; especially the GNU Project. We are actively supporting development of Free Software and furthering GNU-based Operating Systems such as GNU/Linux. Please come and visit us to learn more about Free Software, the work of the FSFE and the Fellowship. www.fsfeurope.org   (606 words)

Libervis.com | Promoting Freedom in a Networked Digital World We promote, discuss and excercise the idea that you and everyone of us should have the freedom to participate and cooperate in creating and sharing culture, including information, art and software. As of October the first the GIF fileformat will be free of patent problems as the patent on the LZW compression which it uses comes to an end. Finally one of the most popular image file formast on the Internet is free for people to use as they wish. www.libervis.com   (405 words)

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