The Freedom in Free Software

The concept of free software was originally codified by GNU project founder Richard M Stallman - better known in the computing world as RMS - in the late 1980s, when computer software as a field was still in its infancy. Free software is any software program which provides its users with four freedoms specified by the official definition of free software:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

RMS recognised the desire to share with one another as a fundamentally good thing, and part of what makes us human. A culture in which people share with their neighbours creates a harmonious and healthy society.

RMS chose to define free software - and created the Free Software Foundation to act as its guardian - to facilitate sharing in the field of computer software - a field which few non-geeks think about, but one which is becoming pervasive in our daily lives.

FOSS

We often refer to "Free and Open Source Software" on this website, sometimes abbreviated as "FOSS", because although we prefer the term free software, many people are more familiar/comfortable with the term "open source". The term "open source" is often promoted in preference to "free" because of the unfortunate ambiguity of the word "free" in the English language.

Most people, when they see the term free software, first think of "free as in zero price". RMS' use of free in free software refers not to price, but rather to freedom or liberty. The fact that most free software is also available gratis (i.e. free of cost) doesn't help to clarify things. This page is an attempt to resolve that ambiguity.

In other languages, the word used to describe free software is generally unambiguous - for example, in languages like French and Spanish, the term "software libre" is used, which has no connotations of price, and therefore no ambiguity.

The term "open source" is undoubtedly better for marketing since it's not ambiguous like "free". It talks about something fairly concrete, namely software source code. The problem is that "open source" takes the emphasis off of the user, and their freedom, and focuses on the technology. An unfortunate by-product is that proprietary corporations have found variants of open source that meet their proprietary objectives (namely, they're not free software) but can be marketed as open source. This is dangerous for anyone valuing his or her freedom.

Well known examples of free software include: Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, OpenOffice, the GNU/Linux operating system, and many hundreds of thousands of other applications. It's worth pointing out that the infrastructure of the Internet is largely made up of free software. Well more than half of the websites available on the web are served by the Apache webserver, another example of free software, making it by far the market leader. It's worth pointing out that free software is used extensively by businesses. For instance, all of Google's infrastructure is free software (hundreds of thousands of servers running GNU/Linux), and a major reason Google's founders were able to build such a hugely successful business was that they were able to exercise their freedom to modify the GNU/Linux code to meet their specific requirements.

Non-free or Proprietary Software

Non-free software which denies its users the four freedoms is generally called "proprietary software". Unlike free software, some or all of the four freedoms are disallowed. With most proprietary software, their End User License Agreement (EULA) - the long scrolling window of legalese that most people are now conditioned to skip and just click "I accept", having no idea what they've liabilities they've actually accepted - all four freedoms are prohibited. Well known examples of proprietary software are Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Apple OS X, Adobe Photoshop, Norton Antivirus, among many many others.

Free software at Egressive

We at Egressive are strongly aligned with the principles of free software, and we put that into practice by working hard to ensure that we run Egressive with free software to the extent possible, and that we provide superior computing solutions for our customers which also consider our customers' freedom as well as their technical requirements.

If you've arrived at this page from one of Egressive's Drupal powered websites, the relevance of free software is that:

Drupal is a very popular and technically virtuostic example of free software. Drupal users enjoy the freedoms guaranteed by the GNU General Public License, the most widely used FOSS license.
Egressive's Drupal sites are all hosted on server infrastructure running the Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system and hosting stack (made up of the Apache webserver, PHP scripting language, and MySQL database), both of which are free software. Egressive, on principle, avoids making customer sites dependent on non-free software to the extent feasible.

Egressive currently uses a very limited number of non-free applications:

We run the ACE Payroll software package to manage our payroll. This is because no suitable free software yet exists to allow us to meet our New Zealand-specific payroll and tax compliance requirements.
We have a few licensed copies of Microsoft Windows XP Pro which are required for the express purpose of testing our websites in the proprietary Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, version 6, 7, and 8
We configure Drupal modules - which are Free Software - which enable the integration of useful non-free (in the free software sense) external web services, like Google Maps.

We look forward to a time when we no longer need to use - or integrate with - proprietary software.

The social impact of free software

If you're new to the concept of free software, and aren't sure you buy it (so to speak :)), we encourage you to read the Free Software Foundation's essay: "What is free software and why is it so important for society?"