Free Software

You would think that if something is free, that demand for it would be high to unlimited. In the most commonly used areas free software is better, for multi-media work proprietary problems slow development, but applications are getting better all the time.

How would you feel if you bought a car, but were prohibited from working on it ?

How often do you have to agree to End User License Agreements (EULAs) that you may need a lawyer to fully interpret, that you barely have time to read because you have your own work to do, and you cannot proceed without agreeing. Feels like extortion doesn't it ? This does not happen with free software. You are not interrupted to determine if your software is legal or paid up. You do get polite notifications when upgrades are available.

What is Free Software ? (John Sullivan video.)

Why Free Software ?

A video message from renowned free software programmer and FSF member Jeremy Allison:

Richard Stallman put it this way:

"I could have made money [by joining the proprietary software world],
and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my
career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people,
and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place." Richard
Stallman, GNU Project (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html).

What is Free Software ?

Richard Stallman defines free software in this video.

Why Free Software Is Better: Eban Moglen video (about an hour)

Standards

Many companies, especially Microsoft, create proprietary file formats that may be of limited life expectancy. After a few years the formats change, the software evolves, and some of the older data may no longer be accessible.

Older versions of documents stored as Microsoft word files are no longer supported and you may no longer be able to read them. Since the format is encumbered by patents, you are pretty much bound to the whim of the MS developments. MP3 files, JPEGs, and many other formats are patent protected, proprietary and subject to change at the whim of the vendor.

Free software formats are open, standard, and unencumbered by patents. Public domain, standard formats are important.

Free software transparency allows it to be fully audited. Because anyone can access, examine, explore and modify the source code, functions can not be hidden. This should be a requirement for at least some applications...like voting machines. Manufacturers of voting machines are all right-wing partisans, and they insist that the software on their machines is a proprietary, trade secret. You can't see it and it is not auditable as a result. Yes, they can steal elections. As voters, insist on open source.

Standardized formats that are open are necessary for long-term accessibility. Government (and everybody else) should insist on open formats for their long-term IT documents.

W3C

Open Formats

Massachusetts favors Open Source software

Join the FSF Campaign for OpenDocument

Software Patents: Summarizing the Problem

Benefits

Since everyone is facing massive budget cuts: consumers, schools, all levels of government, we can get better results for far less money by going to free software.

Free software in schools.

Free software in government

Free software has been getting easier to use and there are now distributions friendly enough for most consumers. (I just installed Ubuntu with almost no effort.)

Performance is better. Aside from the fact that it is cost free, it is faster, and it will not bug you with EULAs and subscription fees.

Free software is auditable. Hidden traps can be exposed as long as the code is completely open.

Free software is more secure.

Free software is more extensible. It is possible to build on software that is already written. Because it is Open, it can be peer reviewed, modified, and used for still further development.

The GNU Project defends software freedom: the user's freedom to run it for any purpose, share it with neighbors, improve it for your own purposes, modify it and redistribute your modifications for the benefit of the whole community.

Eban Moglan: How I discovered Free Software and Met RMS

Commercial software appears to the consumer as a black box. You do not know what is inside it. Eban Moglan spoke to the Free Software Foundation:

"This is really about who is going to have the keys to the home next decade. ...At what point do you want to admit onto your network ... computers which run software you can't see, can't understand, can't control and which reports to other people what is going on your network without your ability to interrupt or do anything? What point do you want to bring a box like that home and put it down on the desk that your child needs to do his homework? ...Those boxes, general purpose computers, running software you can't see, can't control, ...are called intruders. Do you want to have an intruder in every room of your house in ten years or don't you... ?"

Treacherous Computing

Windows 7's Deadly Sins

Licenses

See videos

Applications

Linux Survival Guide (from Planet CCRMA)

Once you begin exploring the thousands of applications that are now available, you begin to wonder why you ever actually paid for software. Some of the best include:

Graphics: Gimp, Inkscape, KPaint, Karbon14, blender,

Email: Evolution, Kmail, Kontact, postfix

Office Applications: Open Office,

Web Browser: Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla, Galeon, Iceweazel.

Web Editor: Apache, Bluefish, Composer, Quanta Plus, Screen

News Reader: Pan

Media Player: Amarok, Kino, MPlayer, Totem, Xine, XMMS, Audacity, gnash

Music: LilyPond, Synthesizers, Midi sequencers (see Rosegarden), Hydrogen, Nyquist, Waon. See PlanetCCRMA (only for Fedora).

Project Planner: MrProject

Content Management: Drupal, Zope, MediaWiki

Blogging: Laconi.ca

Telephone: Asterisk or BLASTERISK

Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL

Programming Tools: Python, Lisp, ADA, Fortran, Assembler, C, C++, Haskell, PHP, Perl, GLADE, wx, and other support tools:

Games: a wide variety and also machine emulators that allow you to continue to run the old Atari and Commodore software.

Video Editing: Blender, OpenShot, KDEnlive, Cinelerra, Kino. ArtistX, TVPaint

System: Samba

For others see http://directory.fsf.org/

Distributions

There is a proliferation of distributions, and that is partly because there are different concerns addressed by each of them. Some are for old machines, others for small ones, some for freedom from proprietary ties, many have proprietary hooks, and so on.

Many you can try without even installing by booting from a live cd.

Download a free, live CD from these websites. Burn the CD as an iso, then run it directly from your CDROM drive without even installing. Running from the CD will be somewhat slow, but actual installation will improve performance considerably. If you have a slow internet connection, it could be easier to buy cds from a good vendor: for example, LinuxCollections or frozentech sells them for a nominal fee.

Pick one distribution, and do not attempt to mix any components from others unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Knoppix may be the easiest live CD to boot. It has very good hardware detection and it can be an excellent diagnostic tool.

Debian is the parent of the best distributions. Choose the stable version if you are not adventurous.

Ubuntu installs easily. Audio is not so easy to configure. See videos.

Mepis

DSL: Damn Small Linux can bring an older machine back.

Puppy Linux

Planet CCRMA offers a suite of audio applications that can only be installed on certain Fedora distributions. It is, by far, best for audio.

64Studio: optimized for audio, but a branch of Debian. There is a 32 bit version that can run on many late-model PCs. Hardware detection (December 2008) is lacking.

Gentoo

The distributions that are most free are:

All of the above distributions have some compromises in their use of non-free software. The most freedom is from Distributions recommended by the FSF

Free, in this case, means no proprietary software components. If you choose one of these distributions, some functionality may not be available (including newer media, since many include DRM.)

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GNULinux, click here.

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