Portal:Free software

Selected article

Audacity is a digital audio editor and recording application. Audacity is cross-platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD. Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University; Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world. The latest stable release of Audacity is 1.2.6, released on 15 November 2006. As of 03 May 2009, it was the 6th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with 59 million downloads

Terminology

Although there was earlier free software, in 1983 Richard Stallman launched the free software movement and founded the Free Software Foundation, to promote the movement and to publish its own definition of free software. Others published alternative definitions of free software, including the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Berkeley Software Distribution-based operating system communities.

In 1998 Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond began a campaign to market what they called open source software. To this end, they founded the Open Source Initiative, which espoused different goals and a different philosophy from Stallman's.

Operating systems

Topics

Impediments and challenges: Digital Rights Management • Tivoisation • Software patents and free software • Trusted Computing • Proprietary software • SCO-Linux controversies • Binary blobs

Adoption issues: OpenDocument format • vendor lock-in • open standards • GNU/Linux adoption

About licences: free software licences • Copyleft • List of FSF approved software licences • List of OSI approved software licences

Common licences: GNU General Public License • GNU Lesser General Public License • Modified BSD License • Mozilla Public License • MIT license • Apache license • Permissive free software licences

History of…: History of free software • History of the Linux kernel • History of Mozilla Application Suite • History of Mozilla Thunderbird • History of Mozilla Firefox

Community: GNU/Linux user groups • free software community • free software movement

Groupings of software: Free audio software • Graphics hardware and FOSS • LAMP stack • Embedded GNU/Linux • Free Java implementations • Free and Open Source games

Naming issues: GNU/Linux naming controversy • Alternative terms for free software • Naming conflict between Debian and Mozilla

Featured and Good content

A number of articles on Free Software topics have been designated featured or good articles.

• Common Unix Printing System;
• GNOME;
• KDE;
• Linux;
• Mozilla Firefox;
• OpenBSD;
• Perl;
• PHP;
• Python (programming language);
• Ubuntu.

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