In a recent post I wrote that I installed the non-free driver for my video card on my new Ubuntu Linux installation. A friend asked me why I had to pay for the driver. I didn’t.
The word “free” has two main meanings in the software world:
- Costs nothing (also known as “Free as in beer”)
- Liberty (or freedom)
The first meaning is easy to understand, but what does it mean that a piece of software has freedom? Wikipedia explains free software as follows:
Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. To make these acts possible, the human readable form of the program (called the source code) must be made available. The source code may be either accompanied by a software license saying that the copyright holder permits these acts (a free software licence), or be released into public domain, so that these rights automatically hold.
Here’s an example of software that is not free: Microsoft Word may just be the most used office productivity application in the world. To read and write a Word document perfectly you have to use Microsoft Word (*). Using Microsoft Word binds you to a format that is not free (unpublished) and forces you to use a specific program. By using Microsoft Word you have given up on your freedom to choose a document editing program. So because the file format isn’t free (as in freedom) you are not free.
As an opposing example, consider another document file format like ODF. ODF is a published Word-like file format that is available to all and so when you edit an ODF file you may choose out of a bunch of applications that are equivalently good at editing the file.
So my choice of a non-free driver for the graphics card was pretty much like choosing Microsoft Word over a different application and file format (with the exception that it was at zero cost). The non-free driver may have given me extra effects on my computer screen but I gave up some freedoms as I made the choice. I start wondering, even though I didn’t complete the move to my new (freedom-free) Linux installation, whether this freedom is something that needs to be protected even if the software is available at no cost forever, just like we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide (again a link to the excellent Coding Horror blog)
For more information about free software, visit the Free Software Foundation website.
* There are other programs that read and write Word documents, but they reverse engineer the Word file format. The reverse engineering is never perfect and can be targeted specifically by the Microsoft to be nearly impossible.