free-software-to-save-the-world.md 3.9KB
title: Free software to save the world
date:
description:
tags: ['free' 'software' 'foss' 'ethics']
draft: true
During the past few years, I've been focused on free software a lot. At first, it seemed to me like a weird thing for hippies and hipsters (which it still is for most people, let's not deny it).
A couple of years later (which is around now), I've became quite involved in free software communities. I have a few diverse contributions to my counter, and I'm currently working at CozyCloud, after a quick (but intense) internship at Matrix.org (as you might have guessed, both work on free software projects). And this world doesn't cease to amaze me.
Now I guess some readers don't know what free software is, or might not understand some expressions I'll be using in this post (plus I'm really stubborn in my way to use them, ask my flatmate). So here's a quick recap. Please note that I'll be talking about free software in this post, but most of my points also applies to resources (images, videos, documentation, etc.) published in the same terms as free software.
Terminology
- Free software: The "free" in "free software" is the same one as in "freedom". Free software is software distributed under a free license, which is a license allowing the 4 freedoms of free software: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how it works and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute it, and the freedom to improve it and publicly release your improvements.
- Open-source software: There's a lot of discussion on the meaning of this expression. For some it's the same as free software, for others it's not. I call "open-source software" all software that isn't distributed a free license but allows the public access to its source code.
- FOSS: An acronym meaning "Free and Open-Source Software".
- Proprietary software: Usually refers to software that isn't free.
A short history of free software
There was a time, at the dawn of programming, where programmers and hackers, researchers and curious people, were all living and working in harmony (kind of). Everyone was discovering the powers of a computer and sharing their discoveries and source codes with the others.
In the early 80s, however, this hacker culture was in decline, as programmers and manufacturers progressively stopped distributing the source code of their programs and started using copyright and restrictive software licenses.
Meanwhile, in a MIT lab, a grumpy hippie named Richard Matthew Stallman, still found of hacker ethic, struggles with the lab's printer. It has paper jam issues, and lacks some cool features Stallman hacked into the previous one. So he emails the printer's manufacturer, Xerox, asking for the source code so he could add his changes to it, which Xerox denied.
This made Stallman realise the hacker culture was disappearing, and made him realise he had to take actions before it was too late.
In 1983, Stallman creates the GNU project which aims at replacing the (mostly) proprietary Unix. Shortly after that, he even quits from the MIT to work full time on it. A couple of years later, he creates the Free Software Foundation with the mission to create a legal structure for free software.
These two projects will serve as the base of what free software is today, by providing the GNU licenses, which are a set of free licenses, and by creating the GNU/Linux operating system (which is often abbreviated as only "Linux"), built on top of the Linux kernel, and which is currently the most used operating system in the world.