Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Freedom Concept of FOSS

I see FOSS is at a loss of $500 for the month of April, 2024.

Please Donate!

Debian does not say anything about it losses. Please help them,too. 

They are not corporate entities but crowd funded projects.

Freedom Concept of FOSS

Free and open-source software

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge. The public availability of the source code is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Richard Stallman's Definition of Free Software

Richard Stallman's Free Software Definition, adopted by the FSF, defines free software as a matter of liberty, not price, and that which upholds the Four Essential Freedoms. The earliest known publication of this definition of his free software definition was in the February 1986 edition of the FSF's now-discontinued GNU's Bulletin publication. The canonical source for the document is in the philosophy section of the GNU Project website. As of August 2017, it is published in 40 languages.

Four essential freedoms of Free Software

To meet the definition of "free software", the FSF requires the software's licensing respect the civil liberties / human rights of what the FSF calls the software user's "Four Essential Freedoms".

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).

3. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)

By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

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