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The Free Software Portal
Welcome to the portal to Wikipedia's content on software which can be freely run, studied, examined, modified, and redistributed by everyone who has a copy. This software, dubbed "free software" in 1983, has also come to be known as "open-source software", "libre software", "FOSS", and "FLOSS". "Free", here, is about being unfettered, not about cost.
The free software movement was launched in 1983 to make these freedoms ubiquitous, and the primary tactic was to write free software replacements for the non-free software that society relied on. Examples of well-known free software packages include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org, and on network servers, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Apache
OpenSolaris is an free software (open source) project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System technology. The project is aimed at developers, system administrators, and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. Over 12,000 community members are registered on OpenSolaris.org, of whom over 11,000 are not Sun employees. An active OpenSolaris User Group community is now growing worldwide, and dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects are being formed on opensolaris.org.
OpenSolaris is derived from the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, though much of it has been modified since originally licensed by Sun for technical reasons. It is the only open source System V derivative available.
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"Free software" is the term coined in 1983 by Richard Stallman to describe software which gives recipients the freedom to run, study, modify and redistribute it. To advertise these views and promote free software, including the GNU project, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985. The FSF publishes the most frequently cited definition of "free software" but others exist, including the Debian Free Software Guidelines. In addition, informal definitions exist within the BSD-based operating system communities, the main divergence being that they disagree with the use of copyleft.
In 1998 Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond began a campaign to market free software under the alternative label "open-source software." To this end they founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI). This term is currently in widespread use but is also an occasional source of friction.
Other names in use include "free and open-source software" (FOSS); "free/libre/open-source software" (FLOSS); and "libre software" or "software libre", from the French/Spanish word libre meaning free but lacking the "without cost" ambiguity.
 The following articles related to free software have been chosen as featured articles on Wikipedia:
- X Window System – a graphical user interface manager, used for drawing windows and other objects on the computer screen
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