Portal:Free software

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edit   Free software Shortcut: P:FS Welcome to the Free software portal! Free software is software that is distributed in a manner that allows its users to run the software for any purpose, to redistribute copies of, and to examine, study, and modify, the source code. The term was coined in 1983, with 'free' denoting the broad freedom given to users, rather than software that is free of charge (which is freeware). Alternative terms for free software include 'software libre' and 'free and open source software' (or 'FOSS'). Open-source is also always free software, though the reverse is not always true. The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary goal of developing free software replacements for the proprietary software that was at that point heavily relied upon. Projects born from the movement include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice, and, on network servers, FreeBSD, Samba, and the Apache web server. More about free software... Main page   Categories   Contribute edit   Selected article Audacity is a digital audio editor and recording application. Audacity is cross-platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and BSD. Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University; Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world. The latest beta release of Audacity is 1.3.13 (Beta),and the current stable version 1.2.6 released on 13 November 2006. As of October 2010, it was the 10th most popular download from SourceForge with 72 million downloads. Archive • Read more... edit   Terminology Although there was earlier free software, in 1983, Richard Stallman launched the free software movement and founded the Free Software Foundation, to promote the movement and to publish its own definition of free software. Others published alternative definitions of free software, including the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Berkeley Software Distribution-based operating system communities. In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond began a campaign to market open source software and founded the Open Source Initiative, which espoused different goals and a different philosophy from Stallman's. More about free software terminology... edit   Operating systems Example BSD-based operating systems: DragonFly BSD FreeBSD MirOS BSD NetBSD OpenBSD PC-BSD Example GNU/Linux distributions: Ubuntu Arch Linux CentOS Debian Fedora gNewSense Mandriva Linux openSUSE Slax Puppy Linux BackTrack Gentoo SliTaz Pardus Bell Labs free software operating systems: Inferno Plan 9 from Bell Labs Notable others: GNU Haiku ReactOS FreeDOS OpenSolaris For a complete list of Wikipedia articles on free software operating systems, see Category:Free software operating systems. edit   Topics Impediments and challenges: Digital Rights Management · Tivoisation · Software patents and free software · Trusted Computing · Proprietary software · SCO-Linux controversies · Binary blobs Adoption issues: OpenDocument format · vendor lock-in · open standards · GNU/Linux adoption About licences: Free software licences · Copyleft · List of FSF approved software licenses · List of OSI approved software licenses Common licences: GNU General Public License · GNU Lesser General Public License · Modified BSD License · Mozilla Public License · MIT license · Apache license · Permissive free software licences History of...: History of free software · History of the Linux kernel · History of Mozilla Application Suite · History of Mozilla Thunderbird · History of Mozilla Firefox Community: GNU/Linux user groups · free software community · free software movement Groupings of software: Free audio software · Graphics hardware and FOSS · LAMP stack · Embedded GNU/Linux · Free Java implementations · Free and Open Source games Naming issues: GNU/Linux naming controversy · Alternative terms for free software · Naming conflict between Debian and Mozilla edit   Featured and Good content A number of articles on Free Software topics have been designated featured or good articles: OpenBSD (operating system) Linux (operating system kernel) PHP (programming language) Python (programming language) Fedora (operating system) Ubuntu (operating system) Please consider improving other Free Software articles; with your attention, they could be added to this list! edit   Related portals Apple Inc. Computer security Computer science Information technology Java Microsoft Python programming Software Technology Google edit   Associated Wikimedia Free software on Wikinews News Free software on Wikiquote Quotes Free software on Commons Images Free software on Wikisource Texts Free software on Wikibooks Manuals What are portals? · List of portals · Featured portals Purge server cache