Portal:Free and open-source software/Introduction
Welcome to the portal to Wikipedia's content on software which can be freely run, studied, examined, modified, and redistributed by everyone who has a copy. This software, dubbed "free software" in 1983, has also come to be known as "open-source software", "software libre", "FOSS", and "FLOSS". "Free", here, is about being unfettered, not about cost.
The free software movement was launched in 1983 to make these freedoms ubiquitous, and the primary tactic was to write free software replacements for the non-free software that society relied on. Examples of well-known free software packages include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org, and on network servers, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Apache