The term was coined by Richard Stallman, who founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the belief that the morally correct method of licensing software was to do so under a license that guarantees the freedom of all the users of that software to do as they wish with it. To do so, he also coined the term copyleft, referring to a copyright license that granted to users most of the rights normally reserved to the copyright holder.
One of the most widely-known free software licenses is the GNU General Public License, which is the license under which the FSF releases most of their software (as part of the [GNU project]? to build a complete operating system from free software). Another is the [BSD-style license]?, so called because it is applied to much of the software distributed with the BSD operating systems.
Free software, as defined by the FSF, is software distributed under a copyright license that grants the following freedoms to all its users:
Software distributed under a license that does not meet these requirements is termed non-free software by the FSF; an interchangeable term is proprietary software. To allow freedoms one and three, the program's source code must necessarily be available along with the executable? form of the software.
The definition of free software makes no distinction about fees or costs for acquiring the software; it is thus distinct from freeware (and the related shareware category) in that whether or not one pays a fee to receive a copy of it, one may still modify it and/or distribute it to others (Freedoms Two and Three, above). By contrast, freeware is usually distributed by the vendor in executable form only (without source code), and has restrictions or prohibitions on examining, modifying and redistributing the software (restricting the freedoms of the user and making it thus non-free).
Many English speakers are confused by the possible meanings of the word "free" in the English language, causing the distinction to be somewhat blurred. Most other languages have separate words for the concepts of "unrestricted" and "zero-cost"; the French terms libre and gratis are recognisable to enough English speakers that they are often used to illustrate the different meanings of "free" when talking about software. The FSF encourages people to "think of 'free speech', not 'free beer'" to understand the distinction between free software and zero-cost software.
Another distinction to draw is between free software and software released to the public domain. While both kinds of software allow all the freedoms listed earlier, public domain software has no copyright owner at all, and anyone is able to take the software, claim ownership of it, modify it, and restrict its use, in effect causing that version to become non-free with or without the consent of the original author. With free software, copyright in the work is still held, and it cannot be reassigned or redistributed without the specific license of the copyright holder.
A large, and ever-growing, amount of software is made available under free software licenses; observers of this trend (and adherents to it) often refer to this phenomenon as the free software movement. Notable free software projects include the Linux and BSD operating system kernels, the BIND? name server, the Sendmail? mail transport server, the Apache web server, the Mozilla web browser, and the Perl, Python and PHP programming languages. Like all free software, these projects distribute their programs under licenses that grant users all the freedoms discussed above.
Open Source is a concept closely related to free software. A group of people who went on to form the Open Source Initiative (OSI) coined the term to attempt to avoid the ambiguity of the English word "free", and to bring a higher profile to the practical benefits of free software. Many people recognise a qualitative benefit to the software development process when a program's source code can be used, modified and redistributed freely by developers; this causes a pragmatic appreciation for free software licenses independent from ideological concerns.
The OSI places emphasis on the pragmatic benefits of access to the program's source code, rather than focusing on user and programmer freedoms. The distinction is subtle, but the FSF considers it significant enough to distance itself from the Open Source term (claiming that free software is the morally correct way to produce software, regardless of whether it produces technically superior software). In most cases, though, licenses which qualify as free software licenses also qualify as open source licenses, and vice versa, so often the two terms are used interchangeably and usually the same people are happy to work on the software regardless of the ideologies involved.
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