What is free software ? If you think it is gratis, you are wrong. You do not need to pay to use most free software available, but this is not the rule. Most free software do not use the pay-to-use economic model and choose a different way to make profit.
You need to think free as in freedom. Richard Stallman, the father of the free software movement, proposed four freedoms that a software need to have to be considered free software:
- Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
- Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
- Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
The freedoms 1 and 3 require source code of the program to be available to the public. Proprietary software (also called closed-source software) is not free software (even if gratis) because the source code is not distributed with the software executable.
Free software vs open source software
You will often hear the term open source software. Free software and open source software are similar, but the definitions are different.
For details about free software, you can look at the free software foundation website. For open source software, look at the open source initiative website.
But at the end of the day, the license under which the software is distributed is the most important document. The free software foundation approves some license as free software and the open source initiative approves some license as open source software. You can check out choosealicense. It lists the most common licenses used today. It is a good start if you need help to choose a license for your software. But you absolutely need to read the license before using it.
Going free
You will find here some excellent free software that you can use. The presented software here are software for everyone. Specialized software is kept out of the article even if excellent.
To surf the web, you can use Firefox as a browser. The software is distributed under the MPL 2.0 license by Mozilla. It is a good replacement to Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge.
The most used office suite is the one made by Microsoft. Microsoft Office is proprietary software. For a free office suite software, you can look at LibreOffice. The software is also distributed under the MPL 2.0. The software is based on the Apache OpenOffice software available under the Apache License 2.0. This is a good example of a free software which is based under another free software. With free software, developers do not need to start from scratch, they can develop from other free software.
VLC is a free media player. It is maybe the best media player available. The software can read almost all audio and video files. It is distributed under the GNU GPLv2 and other variants of the GPL. This show that a software do not need a unique license. VLC and the previously presented software are quite big and lots of people work on them. Some part of a software can be distributed under a license and other parts under another license.
Firefox, LibreOffice and VLC are famous software in the free software world and are used by lots of people daily. These software have big communities with developers and users.
If you want a list of some awesome free software, you can check out this list.
The elephant in the room
Linux is the most successful software. It was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and is currently developed by a huge community. The software is distributed under the GNU GPLv2. It is the kernel of the Linux operating systems and you can find it everywhere. Internet literally runs on Linux. Almost all internet servers runs with Linux. But you can also find it in the most powerful supercomputers to autonomous cars and the International Space Station. The only place where Linux do not dominate the market is in the desktop PC space.
Linux based operating systems are called distribution or distro. As lots of different software are needed to create an operating system, and there is a large diversity of free software, there is a lot of different OS based on Linux. You can check out distrowatch to find the most popular distro of the moment.
If you want to make the jump to Linux, start using free software as Firefox, LibreOffice and VLC. These are the software that you will find in a distro. If you want to test some beginner friendly distribution, you can check out Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Although they can have bits of proprietary software, These OS use lots of free software. This may be a good idea for all the current PC running Windows 7 as the end of extended support for Windows 7 is in January 2020.
Communities
The development of free software involves lots of people. This leads to the creation of a community of developers and users around the software in question.
Help is generally easy to find due to the existence of the community. Also, participation is generally welcomed inside the community.
Because the source is open, everyone can contribute to the project from individuals to enterprises. This can lead to some excellent and useful software simply because you will not take the time to contribute to a project that is not useful or of interest to you.