A Brief note on Free Software Philosophy
Before getting to know what is free software let us understand what is software? What is software? Software is a bunch of instructions given to the computer to do the work in a specific way. Sometimes software is a collection of programs. Softwares are broadly classified into two types 1)Proprietary software 2)Free software What is proprietary software? Proprietary software is software where you cannot change the program according to your requirements. It restricts your freedom to study and modify the source code. It is also called as closed-software because only developers have permission to modify it. What is free software? Free software respects freedom of the user we can modify the source code according to our needs. Free Software Philosophy Richard Stallman started a free software movement (FSM) the year 1983 by launching the GNU (GNU Not Unix) project. To support FSM he later established Free Software Foundation(FSF) in the year 1985. Its headquarters