Wednesday, June 21, 2006

What is Free Software

Free software is defined as software that respects four fundamental freedoms:
(0) freedom to run the software as you wish,
(1) freedom to study the source code and modify it to do what you wish,
(2) freedom to make and redistribute copies, and
(3) freedom to publish modified versions.
Only programmers can directly exercise freedoms 1 and 3, but all users can exercise freedoms 0 and 2, and all users benefit from the modifications that programmers write and publish.

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