Missing pieces

Open source or free software is today important part of information technology industry. Not in every company, but significant part of them. It hardly can be ignored anymore.

There are two kinds of free software (or at least according to Richard Stallman), free as in beer software and free as in freedom software. First one is software that you can get for free, latter one gives you freedom to modify the software and distribute the modified version.

It's easy to confuse these terms as there are all kinds of freely available software. Some of it is freely available, but spies on you. Open source is usually better, but FSF (Free Software Foundation) is not entirely happy with that definition. By FSFs definition open source doesn't necessarily protect users freedoms. For example you could see the source code, but not distribute modifications. It's all about licenses.

As can be seen from the number of different licenses, FSF doesn't represent every free software project out there. Actually one of the most important things that it has influences large number of free software is GPL license that enforces FSFs definition of free software.

In most cases licenses don't affect directly the end user, but for developer they're important. Though as a user it's enough to read GPL once when there's new version of the license. And it doesn't happen that often. That makes users life easier, though who reads the EULA (End-user license agreement) anyway? Though essentialy every one of these license gives more or less user right to download and use the program and that what matters to most people.

So what use are those rights you'll get with free as in speech software? Why anyone should care about anything else than being able to run the software?

One of the important things is that someone can always study the source code and see if the program has some features that can be used to spy the user as I mentioned already. Or maybe program has some security holes. Other benefit is that if some new operating system, processor or some other innovative advance in technology happens, someone can modify the program and keep using it. You can also ask for slight modifications and get the modified version right away. Or at least in source code form, though that doesn't help most users much.

That's why there's sometimes few slightly different versions of program available. Usually it's because part of the developers were not happy where the project was going to and decide to fork the project. Sure, that adds some confusion, but at least developers are happy and who knows, maybe the new project gets better than the original.

Sure, following free software ideals is difficult and it's clearly not for everyone. But thanks to those who follow the idea to the letter, it's always easier to choose free software as the selection gets better. Gnash is not clearly ready yet, but I'm still glad it's there.

If you still want to know more, first place to look is http://www.gnu.org, though good recent overview of Stallmans viewpoint can be found here. Linux Link Tech Show has over hour long interview of Richard Stallman. It's good to check http://www.opensource.org/ out for slightly different point of view.