Free software: Difference between revisions
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Free software has emerged in recent years as an ambiguous term, meaning either software without monetary cost (which is the most commonly-understood meaning) or software that is free according to the standards of the free software movement (which is the meaning strongly insisted upon by a growing minority of free software advocates). These meanings are distinguished in the GNU Free Software Definition by comparison to "free beer" and "free speech".
One definition of "free software" is "software without monetary cost", often called freeware or--though some disagree in applying the name to this--shareware. Freeware and shareware are alike in that they can be obtained and used without monetary cost. Freeware may or may not be redistributed, and rarely does one receive the source code or permission to modify the program. Shareware differs from freeware, however, in that requests of voluntary "shareware fees" are asked, often as part of the program itself (this feature will lead the program to be called nagware); sometimes, paying the fee and obtaining a password will result in access to expanded features, documentation, or support. In some cases, unpaid use of the software is limited in time--in which case the claim of the program to be free software seems very weak indeed. The various limitations imposed on freeware and especially on shareware lead some members of the free software movement, and others, to deny that freeware and shareware actually deserve the name "free software."
Under the definition of the free software movement, "free software" means software that the user is permitted to copy, modify and redistribute. In this sense of the term, "free" refers to "freedom" rather than to a zero purchase price. See free software movement for more details. Under this definition, most freeware is not considered "free software".
A coalition of people in the programming community coined the term "open source software" to speak of free software in the second sense. The term was developed to disambiguate the concept from a question of price as well as to disassociate the practice from the overtly political message of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation; Stallman believes that all software should be free (in the FSF sense). From a pragmatic standpoint, the terms are interchangeable, though they have distinct connotations.
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