What Does Free Mean? or What do you mean by Free Software?


Note: In February 1998 a group moved to replace the term "Free Software" with "Open Source Software". As will become clear in the discussion below, they both refer to essentially the same thing.


Many people new to free software find themselves confused because the word "free" in the term "free software" is not used the way they expect. To them free means "at no cost". An English dictionary lists almost twenty different meanings for "free". Only one of them is "at no cost". The rest refer to liberty and lack of constraint. When we speak of Free Software, we mean freedom, not price.

Software that is free only in the sense that you don't need to pay to use it is hardly free at all. You may be forbidden to pass it on, and you are almost certainly prevented from improving it. Software licensed at no cost is usually a weapon in a marketing campaign to promote a related product or to drive a smaller competitor out of business. There is no guarantee that it will stay free.
Truly free software is always free. Software that is placed in the public domain can be snapped up and put into non-free programs. Any improvements then made are lost to society. To stay free, software must be copyrighted and licensed.
To the uninitiated, either a piece of software is free or it isn't. Real life is much more complicated than that. To understand what kinds of things people are implying when they call software free we must take a little detour into the world of software licenses.
Copyrights are a method of protecting the rights of the creator of certain types of works. In most countries, software you write is automatically copyrighted. A license is the authors way of allowing use of their creation (software in this case), by others, in ways that are acceptable to them. It is up to the author to include a license which declares in what ways the software may be used. For a proper discussion of copyright see http://www.copyright.gov/. Source of debian