Sunday, January 27, 2008

Free Software for your system

Welcome to Free Software Home!!!

Free software is software which can be run, studied, examined, modified, and redistributed by everyone who has a copy. This type of software, which was given its current name in 1983, has also come to be known as "open-source software", "software libre", "FOSS", and "FLOSS". The term "Free" refers to it being unfettered, rather than being free of charge.

The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary tactic to write free software replacements for the non-free software that society relied on. Examples of well-known free software packages include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org, and on network servers, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Apache.

The following list of topics is provided as an overview of and introduction to free software:
Free Software Portal
Contents


* 1 Essence of Free Software
* 2 Branches of Free Software
* 3 History of Free Software
* 4 Basic Free Software concepts
* 5 Free Software scholars
* 6 Leaders in Free Software
* 7 Free Software lists
* 8 See also
* 9 External links

Essence of Free Software

Main article: Free Software

* Free software movement
* Free software community

Branches of Free Software

* GNU Project
* Linux
* Berkeley Software Distribution

History of Free Software

Main article: History of free software

* History of the Linux kernel
* Free Software Foundation
* SCO-Linux controversies
* Open Source Initiative

Basic Free Software concepts

* Open source
* Gratis versus Libre
* Open standard
* Free-software licence
* Open Source Definition
* Debian Social Contract