Miscellaneous > The Lounge

How to explain Free Software to people?

(1/3) > >>

mobrien_12:
I'm running into a problem lately.

People see the cool stuff I can do with Free software.  They would like me to teach them how to do it.  I show them Free software package X such as Cygwin or FireFox and say  "here's what I use and here's where you get it" and they sort of stare at me and ask "so it's shareware?"  

If I say "no it's GPL" they don't understand.  I dont want to say it's freeware, because that doesn't really explain it.  Free software doesn't mean free of charge... it's really about freedom of speech, and they can give the software to whoever the hell they want but must  make the source code available.... and I don't want them to think that it's public domain... but if I try to explain all that I know I'll lose them.

So any suggestions about how to explain Free Software in 4-5 sentences so that the person who has  never heard of it?  I might use the ideas on  my web page athttp://www.geocities.com/mobrien_12 )

Lead Head:
I just tell people "Free software means its open source(it doesn't mean its free of charge though), that means people can take the program's  base code and change it however they want. This allows people to fix a big problem in the program, if there is one, and they can send how to fix it to other people or even the programs original creators"


Thats pretty much what I say

Aloone_Jonez:
[nube]
What's open source? :confused:
Code base, what does that mean? :confused:
[/nube]

This is my explanation but it will still probably confuse the average nube.

Applications are normally written using a programming language like C which computer programmers can understand, this is called the source code and in order for the computer to be able run the program it needs to be converted to machine code (which is a binary format consisting of 0s and 1s) - only the computer can understand this. Because people can't read machine code companies like Apple and Microsoft have chosen to distribute their software in the binary format as it prevents people from figuring out how the program works, including the format it stores your data in when you save files. Companies can also lock you into using their software because competing programs can't read files created with thier software.

Free software is different, the GPL (General Public License) asks that you provide people accesss to the source code when you distribute the software, this means everyone has the freedom to, copy it, learn how it works and modify it. You might wonder how this effects you if you're not a programmer, there are many schools of thought on this, but most importantly it means you don't have to pay to use it (for any purpose) and companies can't lock you into using thier software as other programmers can figure out how it works write programs to read files saved by it.



By the way you can't force people to pay for open source software, unless you include a proprietary part but then it wouldn't be totally free would it?

piratePenguin:
You could point them to:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Aloone_Jonez:
The problem is most nubes won't know about source code, machine code, compilers etc. I think Wikipedia is probably the best source since you can click on the words you don't understand to get the definitions.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page