Free Software
Created | Updated Apr 26, 2004
Posted 4 Minutes Ago
by
Increase Mathers, Shrubber of Pelamar [IMSoP] - Going for gold, going for broke, or maybe just going out with a bang
I give a complete list of definitions for all the different kinds of software that is free in various ways:
freeware
"freeware": software which costs nothing, and has no strings attached to do with cost. "Free as in beer".
- e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader; many small personal projects such as games or simple utilities.
shareware
"shareware", "nagware", and various other variants: software which costs nothing, but tries to get you to buy a version that does; this may include missing features out of the free version or even causing it to cease functioning after a set period/amount of use. Again, "free as in beer", but with even less freedom.
- e.g. Winzip; recent versions of RealPlayer and WinAmp.
Free Software
"Free Software": a concept created by Richard Stallman and the GNU project to represent the idea that the development of computer software should be treated in the same way as traditional scientific research and developed "for the good of all". It should be available "free as in beer", but more importantly it should be "free as in freedom" - the freedom to run, study, redistribute and improve it in any way you see fit. There is nothing wrong with charging money for "Free Software", but it should also be available for no money, as should anything you add to it. True Free Software is "Copylefted" - it uses copyright law to make it a breach of licence to make a derivative which is not also copyleft, and therefore Free.
- e.g. anything licensed under the GPL, including Linux and the many GNU tools that make it usable.
Open Source Software
"Open Source Software" (also "shared source"): a looser term, created by a group of software developers who saw many advantages in the collabourative development which arises from sharing the source code to a program, but who lacked the philosophical conviction of the original "Free Software" movement. The aim of the Open Source movement was to make the sharing of source code appeal more to commercial concerns - arguing, as Smiley Ben says, from a position of pragmatism rather than politics. Software may be open source without being copylefted, and even without providing the freedoms espoused by the originators of Free Software (although there is an official "Open Source Definition" which preserves some of them).
- e.g. BSD, the original Qt license (I'm struggling here a bit, because I don't want to get my licenses in a muddle, but I think those are both considered OS but non-Free)
All these terms get muddled up and made to overlap in general usage, and all could be considered "free software" in the sense of "software that is free", but these are their strictly correct meanings. For the Free Software Foundation's definitions, see
here
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