Introduction to

Free Software

Agenda

● Software freedom

● Free Software in education

● Development model

● Free software adoption

● You can help

Software Freedom

The Moral Dilema

● Friend asks for a copy of a software you own

– You either break the law and make an illegal copy

– Refuse to help your friend

Proprietary Software

● Control your computer

Removethat

Software

No,Keep it

Proprietary Software

● Take away what you own

Amazon

kindle

Chapter 1

Open clipart is a great efort by many

to include something of the same scale

as that for the other efforts so far.

But in all honesty, it is not done and

yet under progress.

The vertical toolbar on the left shows

Inkscape's drawing and editing tools. In the

top part of the window, below the menu,

there's the Commands bar with general

command buttons and the Tool Controls bar

with controls that are specific to each tool.

The status bar at the bottom of the window

will display useful hints and messages as

you work.

Kindle

Remove book “1984”By George Orwell

Proprietary Software

● Collect information about you

MicrosoftPersonalData

Proprietary Software

● Tracks you

Mrs.X went toplace Y today

Proprietary Software

● Restrict what you can do

Backupmy

musicNo

DRM

Proprietary Software

● Helps NSA

– By adding backdoors

– By revealing bugs in their software

– Should the Indian government use Windows?

Proprietary Software

● Are a company's secrets

● Against the spirit of sharing

Sorry,its oursecret

Howdoes this

work?

How Do We Solve the Problem?

● Get together as a group

● Build software that does not enslave the user

Software Freedom

● FREEDOM 0: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose

● FREEDOM 1: The freedom to study and change the program

● FREEDOM 2: The freedom to redistribute copies

● FREEDOM 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others

GNU & FSF

● GNU project started was announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman

● Free Software Foundation created in 1985

● GNU software: GCC, Emacs, GLibc, Bash, GNOME, Gtk, HURD, etc.

GNU/Linux

● Linux was made free by Linus Torvolds in 1992

● GNU/Linux was born with

– Linux as the kernel and

– Everything else from GNU

Free Softwarein Education

Free Software in Education

● Better learning oppurtunity

Howdoes this

work?

Here isthe source

code

Free Software in Education

● Encourages the spirit of sharing

Trignometry

Calculus?

Free Software in Education

● Interesting projects

Large useful project

Your contribution

Small project,less useful

Free Software in Education

● Learn best development practises

Large useful project

Your contribution

Expert Developer

Mentoring

Development Model

Development Model

● Many individuals contribute over Internet

● Anyone can contribute like on Wikipedia

● Commercial companies also develop free software

Development Model

● Don't like the software? Fork it.

ForkCreated

Original Project New Project

Advantages

● Higher quality, fewer bugs

● Stability

● Security

● Few viruses, adware, trojan and spyware

● Available in many languages

Founda bug

Free Software Adoption

Mobile Devices

● Free Software make up majority market share in mobile operating systems

– Android (80%)

– Firefox OS

– Sailfish OS

– Mer

– Tizen● Software used includes Qt,

Java, Linux, Sqlite, glibc, OpenSSL etc.

Super Computing

● 485 of the top 500 super computers use GNU/Linux

Web Servers

● Apache is the top web server by market share (35%)

● Nginx is very good for performance & scalability (15%)

Data Storage

● Open Source RDBMS databases are popular

– MySQL

– PostgreSQL● Most of the successful software around Big Data is Free

Software

– Hadoop

– Cassandra

– HBase

– MongoDB

Programming Languages

● Most of the top programming language are Free Software

– Java

– PHP

– Python

– Ruby

– Others (Perl, Lua, Erlang)● Or have Free Software implementations

– C

– C++

– Javascript

– Others (Scheme, Haskell)

Other Popular Free Software

● Firefox and Chrome web browsers

● LibreOffice suite

● Eclipse and Netbeans IDEs

● VLC and Mplayer media players

● Git distributed version control

● Tor for online anonimity

Barriers for Desktop Adoption

● Few desktop PCs come with pre-installed GNU/Linux from the factory

● Windows application support

● Properietary lock-in

You Can Help!

Free Software

● Sometimes Free Software is not good enough

● Freedom requires sacrifice for long term benefit

You Can Help!

● Join and contribute to a Free Software project

– Many projects have friendly communities● Spread the message

● Help others use Free Software

References

● GNU Philosophy: https://gnu.org/philosophy/

● GNU Project: https://gnu.org

● Debian Social Contract: https://www.debian.org/social_contract

● The GNU General Public License: https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

Attribution

● Image sources

– Wikipedia.org

– OpenClipart.org● Image Licenses

– Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

– Apache License, Version 2.0

– Mozilla Public License Version 1.1

– GNU LGPL 3