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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 the Apache web server. |
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LessTif is a free software reimplementation or clone of the Motif computer programming toolkit. As opposed to Motif, which is distributed under a proprietary license that can require the payment of royalties, LessTif is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a less restrictive, free software license. This makes LessTif more attractive to many developers, distributors and users. The licence of Motif was the main motivation for the development of LessTif. LessTif aims for full source and binary compatibility with Motif. While this has not yet been achieved, many Motif applications run with LessTif and/or can be compiled with it. 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). Example BSD-based operating systems: Example Linux distributions: Bell Labs free software operating systems: Notable others: For a complete list of Wikipedia articles on free software operating systems, see Category:Free software operating systems. Impediments and challenges: Digital Rights Management • Tivoization • Software patents and free software • Trusted Computing • Proprietary software • SCO-Linux controversies • Binary blobs Adoption issues: OpenDocument format • vendor lock-in • open standards • Linux adoption About licences: free software licences • Copyleft • List of FSF approved software licences • List of OSI approved software licences • Comparison of free software licences Common licences: GNU General Public License • GNU Lesser General Public License • Modified BSD License • Mozilla Public License • MIT license • Apache licence • Permissive free software licences History of…: History of free software • History of the Linux kernel • History of Mozilla Application Suite • History of Mozilla Thunderbird • History of Mozilla Firefox Community: Linux User Group • free software community • free software movement Groupings of software: Free audio software • Graphics hardware and FOSS • LAMP stack • Embedded Linux • Free Java implementations • Free and Open Source games Naming issues: GNU/Linux naming controversy • Alternative terms for free software • Naming conflict between Debian and Mozilla The following articles related to the Free Software Portal have been chosen as featured articles on Wikipedia: 
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- This page was last modified on 17 August 2008, at 22:10.
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