Free Software Movement

Free software fosters cooperation because all developers can share software and knowledge freely. This is consistent with the idea of science, and how new ideas are built from old ones, and where ideas can be peer reviewed and incrementally improved over time by the contributions of many. Free software development is essentially scientific software development.

A huge network of people worldwide has contributed to building free software over the past several decades. Free software has been the driving force in the rise of the Internet, while at the same time, the ability for large groups to collaborate without boundaries has accelerated the development of free software itself.

Free software stands for cooperation, equality, and solidarity, and for a culture of remix and collaborate development along scientific methods. The free software movement views software and source code as a form of speech, stating that software, and by extension, knowledge and culture, must be free, as an ethical prerogative, as the collective heritage of all humankind, and as a fundamental human right issue: the right to think, to express, to produce new and better works and promote progress.

The open source movement supports the methodology and use of free software, but with purely practical motivations. They are primarily concerned with the practical fact that free software produces better results than proprietary software, and so they are less directly concerned with the question of human freedom itself.

Free software supporters usually fight against

• penal laws such as Digital Millennium Copyright Act that can put people into jail if they share content;
• “digital restrictions,” better known as “treacherous computing,” which are technical means designed to control what people can do with their own equipment by allowing outside corporations to obtain ownership over their private possessions, data, and the like;
• software “idea” patenting, which severely limits what people are permitted to think or express through software;
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• international treaties that spread any or all of the above restrictions to other parts of the world, often for the exclusive benefit of established corporations while asking people, governments, and organizations to use, develop, and promote it.

As technology evolves, more and more daily processes, even laws and human social interactions, have become automated through the use of specialized machinery, sometimes computers. These machines are controlled by a set of modifiable instructions called programs or software, which are written in specialized formal languages, commonly called a source code.

Programs are usually written in a formal language so that people can read and understand what they do and learn from them, just as other forms of literary expression are used to convey and build knowledge. These source code languages are used to express the operation of the computer in human-understandable terms. Usually these programs are then automatically translated into machine-specific instructions, or binary machine code, which is neither easily nor directly understood by people.

Many corporations that distribute software give programs to users only in the binary machine code format and use copyright laws to establish this machine code as an intellectual work. Because users often receive software in this machine format, they cannot understand directly what the program does or how it works.

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