Portal:Free software/categories

THE FREE SOFTWARE PORTAL

Free software is software that is distributed with a licence that authorises its users to run the software for any purpose, to redistribute copies of, and to examine, study, and modify the source code. The term free software was coined in 1983, with free denoting the broad freedom that the licence gives users, rather than being free-of-charge (i.e., freeware). Alternative terms for free software include software libre, libre software, open source software, and, free and open source software (abbreviated FOSS and F/OSS).

The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary goal of developing free software replacements for the proprietary software that society had come to rely upon. Examples of well-known free software packages include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice, and, on network servers, FreeBSD, Samba, and the Apache web server.