Proposals for ‘The Three Software Freedoms’

The Three Software Freedoms – always interesting the timing of things like this.

In short:

    The freedom to study the software
    The freedom to modify the software
    The freedom to redistribute the software, modified or unmodified

Read their full, verbose definitions here.


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1 Comment

  1. Although I agree with their rewording, it is much clearer and better. I do disagree to their assertion that “there is no legitimate reason for a software vendor to keep the code of their software secret”. I am a software engineering and the source code for a lot of companies needs to remain closed for the business model to work.

    If I spend a year writing a game for mobile and release it and the source code then there is little I can do to stop someone re-branding it and selling it under their own name. Many of us do not have the resources to take someone to court and by the time it is resolved all the profit has been removed.

    In short, I can not make a living if I were forced to give away all my work.

    I do release code that I write at home in my spare time and contribute to open source projects.

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