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Miloslav Ciz 2025-06-26 00:54:22 +02:00
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@ -47,6 +47,8 @@ Free software is also known as *free as in freedom*, *free as in speech* softwar
*Knowledge graph illustrating basic relationships between various terms and groups related to free software.*
{ Thanks to Ramon for calling this a "schizo graph" :D ~drummyfish }
Though unknown to common people, the invention and adoption of free software has been **one the most important events in the [history](history.md) of computers** -- mere technology consumers nowadays don't even realize (and aren't told) that what they're using consists and has been enabled possibly mostly by software written non-commercially, by volunteers for free, **basically on [communist](communism.md) principles**. Even if [consumer](consumerism.md) technology is unethical because the underlying free technology has been modified by [corporations](corporation.md) to abuse the users, without free software the situation would have been yet incomparably worse if [Richard Stallman](rms.md) hadn't achieved the small miracle of establishing the free software movement. Without it there would probably be practically no alternative to abusive technology nowadays, everything would be much more closed, there would probably be no "[open source](open_source.md)", "[open hardware](open_hardware.md)" such as [Arduino](arduino.md) and things such as [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md). If the danger of [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md) in software wasn't foreseen and countered by Richard Stallman right in the start, the corporations' push of legislation would probably have continued and copyright [laws](law.md) might have been many times worse today, to the point of not even being able to legally write free software nowadays. We have to be very grateful that this happened and continue to support free software.
[Richard Stallman](rms.md), the inventor of the concept and the term "free software", says free software is about ensuring the freedom of computer users, i.e. people truly owning their tools -- he points out that unless people have complete control over their tools, they don't truly own them and will instead become controlled and abused by the makers (true owners) of those tools, which in [capitalism](capitalism.md) are [corporations](corporation.md). Richard Stallman stressed that **there is no such thing as partially free software** -- it takes only a single line of code to take away the user's freedom and therefore if software is to be free, it has to be free as a whole. This is in direct contrast with [open source](open_source.md) (a term discourages by Stallman himself) which happily tolerates for example [Windows](windows.md) only programs and accepts them as "open source", even though such a program cannot be run without the underlying proprietary code of the platform. It is therefore important to support free software rather than the business spoiled open source.