The Importance of Free Software
What is "Free Software"?
When you think of free software, the first thing you might think of is free as in "Gratis", or Free as in Price. This is not the free this page will be discussing. The free we are actually talking about is Free as in "Libre", or Free as in Freedom.
To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. Not only that, Using free software comes with many benefits. You are free to modify the code in any way to your own liking, redistribute to another person, use commercially or in an enterprise environment, and far more depending on the license that software uses. Free software can also be far more secure than it's proprietary competitors. Anyone can test the code, find bugs or exploits, and push in patches for said bug or exploit.
Unfortunately, the opposite side to this is far more popular to average people usually without their awareness. This opposite side disallows any sharing, studying, or modification of such software or media, and will usually be behind a corporation that may spy on your activities or take personal information, and sometimes require a paid license to use or use commercially. This is called Proprietary Software. This includes software like:
- Sublime Text
- Adobe software
- Microsoft Windows
- Apple operating systems
- Google Chrome (Chromium is free software, Chrome is not).
Websites can also fall under the category of Proprietary Software, which is far more common even if you're using free software to view them.
Sites like:
- Netflix
- Hulu
- Youtube
- Google (including Google services)
- CodeHS
fall under the "Proprietary" class. This also includes sites
that use DRM for content. An extension
named LibreJS
can prevent the execution of non-free JavaScript for websites.
Many pieces of proprietary software also take use of free software, and there are pieces of some proprietary software that are open sourced. However, while it's still better than nothing, Its usually agreed upon that it isn't enough, and is still labeled as proprietary software, or "Half Open-Source".
What are some alternatives to common proprietary software?
There are many existing alternatives to certain common proprietary
software, most of which exceed or come on-par to a feature
level.
| Proprietary Software | FOSS Substitute |
|---|---|
| Microsoft 365, Google Services | LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice |
| Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D | Blender |
| Sublime Text, MS Visual Studio Code | Atom, GNU Emacs, VSCodium |
| Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS | Ubuntu / OpenSUSE / Fedora Linux, FreeBSD |
| Google Chrome, Opera, Safari | Firefox (or GNU Icecat), Chromium, Brave |