Free Software: An Introduction from ifPeople

WHAT IS FREE SOFTWARE?

"Free Software" refers not to the price of the software, but to the unrestricted right right to run, copy, distribute, study, modify and improve it. Because access to the source code is a precondition to exercising these freedoms, software that bears a Free Software license is sometimes also referred to as "Open Source" software.

What are some examples of Free Software?

• GNU/Linux operating system
• Mozilla Web browser
• OpenOffice" office suite
• Apache Web server

Did you know...?

• The Linux OS is found embedded in the core of consumer electronics like TiVo and Motorola cell phones.
• Linux is now run on more desktops than Apple's MacOS.
• The Apache Web server serves more than two-thirds of the Web's content.
• Mozilla was named by PC World Magazine as best Web browser in 2003
• IBM recently released its Cloudscape Java database software as an open source project in order to improve
• its product and take advantage of a developer community.
• The search engine Google operates on a cluster of more than 10,000 computers running Linux. Google is also known for its extensive use of the Free Software language Python.

HOW DOES DOES FREE SOFTWARE BENEFIT MY COMMUNITY?

Education and Sustainable Development

Free Software represents a democratic technology model that promotes education and sustainable development. Attempting to promote these values by broadening access to closed, proprietary information technology simply increases technological dependency on a particular vendor's products. Free Software, on the other hand, by virtue of its openness, offers the possibility of a far deeper knowledge of information technology and for far greater participation in its creation, and thus contributes to the growth of independent information technology industries in countries where such industries do not exist.

Free Software and the Environment

While the pace of innovation in the Free Software community is such that many Free Software projects do take advantage of the latest innovations in computer hardware, the kind of forced hardware upgrades that are commonplace in the proprietary software world (e.g., the differences in system resources requirements between successive versions of Microsoft Windows are considerable) are not as common among users of Free Software. Due to its peer-reviewed nature Free Software tends to make more efficient use of system resources and doesn't suffer from the bloatware complex of its proprietary counterpart. This can increase the duration of the useful life of computer hardware and reduce the volume that must be recycled or that otherwise finds its way into landfills.

HOW DOES FREE SOFTWARE BENEFIT ME?

The variety and quality of Free Software applications--generally available on the Web for download, and without any licensing fees--continues to improve at a rapid pace. Long venerated as a reliable server platform, GNU/Linux has also benefited in recent years from significant improvements in the availability and usability of Free Software desktop applications. OpenOffice, for example, provides a suite of office applications that provide all the necesssary functionality of prohibitively expensive proprietary packages like Microsoft Office, while the Novell Evolution groupware suite is a fully mature, feature-for-feature replacement for Microsoft Outlook.

Also noteworthy is the emergence of the superior open source Mozilla Web browser (and offshoots like Firefox) from the ashes of the Netscape's defeat in the browser wars. These examples alone provide a set of software tools that would permit an average user to accomplish 95% of his or her daily computing tasks. Open Office and Mozilla are also available for Windows and Mac OS X.

In the case of more specialized software, an application with a Free Software license offers the possibility for developers to customize it according to a particular set of needs.

If your business is developing a software product of sufficiently broad interest, it may make sense to apply a Free Software license to it and release it as a Free/Open Souce Software project, harnessing the power of a developer community with common interests, and saving you the trouble of bearing 100% of the burden of development and maintenance. Free Software is peer-reviewed software, which by its nature results in:

• Better security
• Higher performance
• More frequent bug fixes and enhancements