What is free software?

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

Quite a few people believe that at the core of free software, you will find the linux kernel. That is not really true. The linux kernel is just a technical artefact and embodiment of some of the free software community's efforts. At the core of free software you will find its libertarian statement of morality, the General Public License (GPL).

Non-free, proprietary software is evil and must be shunned. For example, here the Free Software Foundation reprimands the Debian project for its lack of diligence in expunging non-free software:

Debian's Social Contract states the goal of making Debian entirely free software, and Debian conscientiously keeps nonfree software out of the official Debian system. However, Debian also provides a repository of nonfree software. According to the project, this software is “not part of the Debian system,” but the repository is hosted on many of the project's main servers, and people can readily learn about these nonfree packages by browsing Debian's online package database.

Meh.

Misleading advertising.

Free software! Pay via credit card.

The usual suspects, twisting the language with the assistance of lawyers, those wonderful people who brought you Uriah Heep and Shylock.

vladimir wrote:Free software! Pay via credit card.

Free software is usually also free of charge, but that is not a requirement. There are other issues that are much more important than just price. For example, software that is free of charge but that comes without the source code, and the right to make any changes as wished, is not free.

Evil and must be shunned... Wow.

Idealist are amusing. Especially when condemning others for wishing to preserve the fruits of their labors.

OrangeDragon wrote:Evil and must be shunned... Wow. Idealist are amusing. Especially when condemning others for wishing to preserve the fruits of their labors.

Google and Facebook are not doing that bad with respect to preserving the fruit of their labour, which they have built entirely on top of free software. Google is worth almost half a trillion dollars. That is quite a bit more than Microsoft in terms of fruits of their labour, isn't it? The only problem that we have with these companies, is about privacy of their users' data. But then again, privacy is not related to the efforts of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) but of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). So, they are not on the FSF watch list but on the one of the EFF. But then again, these companies seem to be quite cooperative and respond swiftly to complaints concerning privacy.

OrangeDragon wrote:Evil and must be shunned... Wow.

Idealist are amusing. Especially when condemning others for wishing to preserve the fruits of their labors.

It's not about them wishing to preserve anything. I respect that, just don't dress it up as something else.

It's about the deliberately misleading use of the term 'free'.

I suspect if you booked into a hotel that advertised 'free meals' and you then got charged for them, you'd also be slightly taken aback, and possibly very angry.

vladimir wrote:It's about the deliberately misleading use of the term 'free'. I suspect if you booked into a hotel that advertised 'free meals' and you then got charged for them, you'd also be slightly taken aback, and possibly very angry.

The definition of "free" software does not forbid charging money for software, even though most free software is indeed for free. Forbidding to charge for free software would reduce the users' freedom. Therefore, you can indeed download free software for free, put it on a CD and then charge for the CD. This is perfectly well allowed.

In order to encourage the distribution of free software, we encourage anybody who finds a novel way to distribute it, to charge money in order to cover their expenses and make a profit.

Free as in beer and free as in people are two different things. Open source foundations promote the latter. I personally prefer software which is free as in people.

Many corporations manage to liberate their products' source code and still make money from them. Google sells Android despite its Apache licensing, Facebook still operates despite open sourcing HHVM, Oracle purchased MySQL and benefits from it. I see the Richard Stallman perspective of evil and must be shunned, but I personally run plenty of proprietary software that I am not able to inspect fully. Many of my kernel drivers, multimedia codecs and other pieces of my computer would be hard to live without in the modern day and age.

I personally don't care what licensing developers choose to use as long as they are compatible with what I wish to accomplish. I think all this licensing has grown to unproportionate levels. It's a sad fact that many developers choose not to publish patches because they are not legally confident in doing so. And it's even worse when developers apply common licenses on their projects without understanding how they function, for example web developers licensing their source under GPL without understanding that the requirement to share modifications only applies to the people whose machine executes the code (in many cases the server, in other words the project forkers themselves).

I'm a strong believer in WTFPL:
Please note that proprietary software and file types are often compatible with open source alternatives. Libreoffice supports the Microsoft Word DOC format, for example. If developers of open source software need to interact with proprietary software or structures they will without violation.

I have absolutely no problem with people covering costs. Just don't say the stuff is free, when it's obviously not.

None of you would like to be shafted by fine print in a contract, so let's just encourage people to be 100% honest, there is no shame in honesty. To think that such an opinion is regarded as idealistic is a sad reflection, really.

vladimir wrote:I have absolutely no problem with people covering costs. Just don't say the stuff is free, when it's obviously not.

Who says something is free when it's obviously not about what?