Time: 1 hour
- Introduction to free software- Origins and History. (10 mts)
- Importance of free software (10 mts)
- People in free software. (10 mts)
- Difference between the terms opensource and free software. (10 mts)
- Various organizations involved in promotion of Free and Opensource software (10 mts)
- Popular Free Software Licenses: Public and Private licenses (GPL,AGPL,FDL,MIT,BSD, Apache licenses etc) (10 mts)
Time : 10 mts
Free software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study,change, and distribute it and any modified versions. The freedom provided is often known as the four freedoms in free software. In free software, the source code (human readable form as written by the programmer) is readable and modified to use and distributed; whereas in proprietarty software, these rights are denied, and the user is provided only a machine readable format of the software(machine code), which can only be run/executed. Free software is a matter or liberty, not price: users and computer programmers are free to do what they want with their copies of free software but by preserving the freedom granted.
The concept of free sharing of technological information existed long before computers. eg; in the early years of automobile development, one enterprise owned the rights to a 2-cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B Selden. By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands or risk a lawsuit. In 1911 independent automaker Henry Ford won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden patent become invalid with the advent of a new association - Motor Vehicle Manufactures Association which instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all US auto manufacturers which enabled sharing of patented technology openly and without the exchange of money (or lawsuits).
In the 1950's and into the 1960's almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration, often shared as public domain software. The source code used to be shared along with the machine code because to run on different hardware, the user frequently needed to modify the source code. The first example of free and opensource is believed to be the A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC. By the advent of ARPANET in 1969, sharing of software got easier. Some free software which was developed in the 1970's such as TeX(developed by the famous computer scientist, Donald Knuth) continues to be developed and used.
Software was not considered copyrightable before the 1974 US Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) decided software programs as a subject matter of copyright. This decision and the case ruling of Apple Computer.Inc vs Franklin Computer Corp in 1983 which held that a computer's operating system could be protected by copyright. As an impact of this, binary code ,the machine readable form of software, was copyrightable too in addition to the human-readable source code.