Free Software

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The Free Software world has become quite interesting these days, especially with Microsoft and other companies now making their source code "available". I can only imagine the kinds of non-disclosure agreements one would have to sign to see that stuff. I for one would not want to create such restrictions on my work options for the rest of my career. The free software that is now available has gained a lot of attention due to its reliability and price when compared to non-free solutions. Many websites use GNU/Linux or BSD descendant operating systems with free applications, such as Apache, PHP, and MySQL to serve their data. Companies like VA Linux Systems, Redhat, and SuSE make money by offering support for these systems.

There are several different kinds of free software, most of which are addressed nicely by GNU's Categories of Free and Non-Free Software article. As you can guess, Free Software Foundation (of which GNU (GNU's Not Unix) is a part) is very serious about what free software is. When they say "free software", they mean it as is "free beer". The software and the source code are all free with no strings attached. They have plenty of other articles on the subject, if that one wasn't enough for you. There is also the Open Source movement, who's aim is simply to make source code available for software under a variety of terms. Their website has a rather disturbing set of articles having to do with Microsoft. These were named the Halloween Documents.

I'll also give the folks at GNU a nod by pointing out that "Linux" is actually just the operating system's kernel. There is vast amounts of other software that is required to create a working operating system. Much of this software comes from the GNU project. Therefore, a more accurate name for the operating system in question is GNU/Linux, even though just plain "Linux" sounds/looks better (the GNU founders have themselves to blame for that).

Updated on 05/27/2003