Todays meeting covered the topic of free sofware. When computers were first made people were free to share software, anyone could share and reuse the source code. However, due to computers gain in popularity companies started selling software and made free sharing illegal. A man called Richard M. Stallman then started a Free Software Foundation under the name GNU to allow users once more to share and reuse software. In his goal to keep free software free, he created the GNU Public License to ensure that users do not steal and sell free software.
Open Source was the attempt to have free software used in the business world. The name Free Software was changed to Open Source to counter proprietary (closed source) software. Closed source software essentially means that one cannot freely see, use and modify the source code. You do not own it either by purchasing, you just have a license to use the software. However with free software anyone is able to see, use and edit. Software is usually developed by people within the community which is why I would assume free software is more suited for the community.
I actually am a user of free software for many years, to be exact I have been using Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird for about six years. I originally moved away from Internet Explorer due to it crashing so much, and the need to download so many addons and random things in order to view web pages properly. Mozilla was so much smoother and dependable, and when they released the update with "multiple tabs on one window" I was hooked! That function was not implemented into Internet Explorer for a while which kind of shows how free software seems to follow the "from the people for the people" line. Next I might actually try Linux, who knows?
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