Free World (software)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Cold War political concept, see Free World. For other uses of "free world", see Free world (disambiguation).

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (July 2006)

This article does not cite any references or sources. (July 2006) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Richard Stallman and the free software movement use the term Free World to describe the set of software, people, commercial/non-profit companies, that adhere to the 4 basic freedoms of free software.

So they for example speak of the Free World (note the capital letters) when they refer to a GNU/Linux distribution composed only of free software and they say that for example some free application that uses non-free libraries can't be run in a Free World, since in a Free World these non-free libraries don't exist. Debian GNU/Linux (the main distribution of Debian) is a self-sufficient system composed of Free Software, but since the Debian Project also distributes some non-free software, it's not touted by Richard Stallman et al.

In a broader sense, lawyers for example are said to live in a Free World, because they have the freedom to study, modify and freely redistribute legal knowledge, decisions and strategies.