Portal:Free software

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THE FREE SOFTWARE PORTAL (estd. 2005)

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 or libre software", "FOSS", and "FLOSS". The term "Free" refers to it being unfettered, rather than being free-of-charge. In this sense, it is the user who is free.

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 and Apache.

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Selected article

Psiphon is a web proxy designed to help Internet users affected by Internet censorship securely bypass content-filtering systems set up by governments such as China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and others. Psiphon was developed by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, building upon previous generations of web proxy software systems, such as the "SafeWeb" and "Anonymizer" systems.

Psiphon's recommended use is among private, trusted relationships that span censored and uncensored locations (such as those that exist among friends and family members, for example) rather than as an open public proxy. Traffic between clients and servers in the Psiphon system is encrypted using the https protocol.

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Terminology

Although there was free software before this date, the term "free software" was coined in 1983 by Richard Stallman, and was used by Stallman's Free Software Foundation and defined by their Free Software Definition. Similar definitions were later published, such as the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Additionally, informal definitions exist within the BSD-based operating system communities, the main divergence being that they disagree with the use of copyleft.

In 1998 Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond began a campaign to market free software under the replacement label "open-source software." To this end they founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

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