Systems  Pen Drives Operating Systems Free Software? Articles Contact  What is Free Software: Free Software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free beer". Free Software is a matter of the freedom to run, copy, distribute, sell, study, change, and improve, the software -- for all the software included in the system, except for some controversial proprietary licensed binary blobs in the Linux kernel. This is mainly beneficial for developers. For users the benefits of this kind of technological freedom and social cooperation are typically: better performance, security, reliability; faster development so new features appear sooner and are usable sooner, and the access to other users' contributions. In other words, users benefit indirectly, from those who can improve the software. And with software running everywhere in our society today, controlling most of what we can read and do, unless users have some fundamental freedoms over it, she/he has no knowledge or authority over what is happening inside it. It does not even matter if you do not have the knowledge or time to read and modify code: what matters is your freedom to do so, including the ability to have someone do it for you. The software is called by many names, but the most correct of these names is "Free Software". It's important to understand that "Free Software" is mostly the same as "Open Source" software, but because different words convey different ideas it's also important to advocate in a clear way, which is to simply use words that actually convey the idea of freedom. "Open Source" conveys the software development methodology; "Free Software" conveys the social movement and software freedom. What is Proprietary Software? The term proprietary software is often used to mean computer software which is neither free nor open source (as these terms are variously defined, especially by FOSS advocates such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative). Terminology for forms of software licensing is not fully standardized and can be controversial. A literal meaning of "proprietary" in relation to software is that it has a copyright owner who can exercise control over what users can do with the software, in contrast to public domain. However, the term is also commonly used to describe software with restrictions on use or private modification, or with restrictions judged to be excessive on copying or publishing of modified or unmodified versions. These restrictions are placed on it by one of its proprietors. In this sense it is also known as "non-free software" and is the opposite of Free Software, generally speaking. What is Source Code? In computer science, source code (commonly just source or code) is any collection of statements or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language. Source code is the mechanism most often used by programmers to specify the actions to be performed by a computer. A computer program's source code is the collection of files needed to convert from human-readable form to some kind of computer-executable form. The source code may be converted into an executable file by a compiler, or executed on the fly from the human readable form with the aid of an interpreter. The code base of a programming project is the larger collection of all the source code of all the computer programs which make up the project. InaTux.com in its entirety is protected by US Copyright laws. © 2010 InaTux. Restricted use permitted as stated under the InaTux Legal Policy. Partner: ReviewLinux.com - GNU+Linux Distribution Reviews, News, HowTos & Videos.