The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the software. Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software, is termed free software.
The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license compatibility.
An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition, and interpretations vary with usage.
Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003 by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is an eingetragener Verein under German law founded in 2001 to support all aspects of the free software movement in Europe, with registered chapters in several European countries. It is the European sister organization of the US-based Free Software Foundation (FSF). FSF and FSFE are financially and legally separate entities.
A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source code and object code forms, unless that software was developed by the United States Government, in which case it cannot be copyrighted. Authors of copyrighted software can donate their software to the public domain, in which case it is also not covered by copyright and, as a result, cannot be licensed.
Georg C. F. Greve is a software developer, physicist, author and currently co-founder and president at Vereign. He has been working on technology politics since he founded the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) in 2001.
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users.
Harald Welte, also known as LaForge, is a German programmer.
Florian Müller is an app developer and an intellectual property activist. He consulted for Microsoft and writes the FOSSPatents blog about patent and copyright issues. From 1985 to 1998, he was a computer magazine writer and consultant for companies, helping with collaborations between software companies. In 2004 he founded the NoSoftwarePatents campaign and in 2007 he provided some consultancy in relation to football policy.
Microsoft Corp. v. Commission is a case brought by the European Commission of the European Union (EU) against Microsoft for abuse of its dominant position in the market. It started as a complaint from Sun Microsystems over Microsoft's licensing practices in 1993, and eventually resulted in the EU ordering Microsoft to divulge certain information about its server products and release a version of Microsoft Windows without Windows Media Player. The European Commission especially focused on the interoperability issue.
Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.
In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code, the human-readable form of software, was generally distributed with the software providing the ability to fix bugs or add new functions. Universities were early adopters of computing technology. Many of the modifications developed by universities were openly shared, in keeping with the academic principles of sharing knowledge, and organizations sprung up to facilitate sharing. As large-scale operating systems matured, fewer organizations allowed modifications to the operating software, and eventually such operating systems were closed to modification. However, utilities and other added-function applications are still shared and new organizations have been formed to promote the sharing of software.
Opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. In response, various mechanisms have been tried to defuse the perceived problem.
A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an open source license.
Proprietary software, also known as non-free software or closed-source software, is computer software for which the software's publisher or another person reserves some licensing rights to use, modify, share modifications, or share the software, restricting user freedom with the software they lease. It is the opposite of open-source or free software. Non-free software sometimes includes patent rights.
The open-source-software movement is a movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, as part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea of open-source software. Programmers who support the open-source-movement philosophy contribute to the open-source community by voluntarily writing and exchanging programming code for software development. The term "open source" requires that no one can discriminate against a group in not sharing the edited code or hinder others from editing their already-edited work. This approach to software development allows anyone to obtain and modify open-source code. These modifications are distributed back to the developers within the open-source community of people who are working with the software. In this way, the identities of all individuals participating in code modification are disclosed and the transformation of the code is documented over time. This method makes it difficult to establish ownership of a particular bit of code but is in keeping with the open-source-movement philosophy. These goals promote the production of high-quality programs as well as working cooperatively with other similarly-minded people to improve open-source technology.
The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review was an English language law review focusing on Free and open source software.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages. TDF doesn't provide support for LibreOffice, but enterprised-focused editions are available from companies in the ecosystem.
FairSearch is a group of organizations that lobby against Google's market dominance in online search and related practices. The group is controlled by Oracle and Naspers executives and has been characterized as a consumer protection organization, a Google watchdog, as well as a front group for Microsoft. Many of its other members are also Google competitors, such as Expedia and Oracle.
