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Free
1. Exempt from subjection to the will of others;
   not under restraint, control, or compulsion;
   able to follow one's own impulses, desires, or inclinations;
   determining one's own course of action; not dependent; at liberty.
   (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913))

When I try to explain what free software is I often feel like Morpheus from the movie "The Matrix". Take the blue pill and you can go back to the comfort of what you are familiar with. Take the red pill and step into a world where anything is possible.

That's a little extreme, but only a little.

If you've used the Internet (like now), you've used free software. The Internet and e-mail grew from and rely on free, open standards and protocols such as HTML, TCP, IP and SMTP. Open standards and protocols allow diverse computer hardware around the globe to be interoperable.

Most of the content of the Web is served up by Apache Server, often running on Linux and using scripting languages such as Javascript, PHP and Perl to generate content from MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. All of these are free software, but most people interact with them through non-free systems and have only a marginal awareness of what is behind the e-mail or web pages they see on their screen.

In early computing days software was free. If you had something that could be of use to your neighbour you simply gave them a copy as a matter of courtesy. As computing reached a broader audience and corporations jockeyed for advantage in pursuit of profits, freedom gave way to various forms of control. One who witnessed this change and could not accept it was MIT programmer Richard Stallman. Stallman believed that software should be free and on the strength of his convictions quit his job at MIT to form the Gnu Project and later the Free Software Foundation.

The Gnu Project's goal was to develop a free operating system and accompanying applications. Over time the Gnu Project developed a range of software, but it lacked a kernel, the core of an operating system. In 1991 a Finnish university student named Linus Torvalds began development of a Unix-like operating system for personal computers. Initially conceived as a hobby, Torvald's kernel was adopted by the Gnu Project and the combination caught the interest of developers around the world.

Free software has continued to grow among communities on the Internet, unbound by licensing restrictions, geography or politics and communicating through websites, Wikis, IRC chat, news groups and other on-line methods. Anyone can have free software source code. Anyone can contribute improvements. These contributions are viewed by the rest of the development community around the globe.

While the free software philosophy motivates many of those involved, the success of free software as a development model has caught the attention of major players like Sun Microsystems and IBM who in recent years have invested billions in free software development. The peer review that is a normal part of free software development has proven to produce software of the highest quality. The fact that the pool of talent spans the globe has proven to make exceptionally fast development possible. The availability of source code and freedom to use and modify it means not having to re-invent the wheel repeatedly. New software can be built based on the existing body of knowledge.

Large scale end users are taking note as well. Recently a number of American states began bringing together a pool of free software for government use. The freedom offered by free software means that state and local governments can work together on software projects at much less cost than had previously been the case. When proprietary software ruled the day, for a joint project of any kind to get off the ground first required teams of lawyers to work through the licensing restrictions.

Free software also offers advantages for long-term data storage. Proprietary file formats put the data owner at the mercy of the company whose format is used. In some cases a company no longer supports a format and since that format is not open the data held in that format cannot be accessed using newer systems. Free software uses open standards and formats so that even if the original application that created a file is no longer available, it is possible to produce a solution to access that data. This advantage is not lost on governments in many parts of the world who are turning to free software as a better solution for storage of data held in the public trust.

Strangely enough it is the small business, home and volunteer sectors that have been slowest to realize the benefits of free software. In a small business, volunteer organization or home the source code will likely never be looked at. Whether government files will be easily read in 50 years is likely not a great concern today. That free software makes computing available to entrepreneurs in developing nations is nice, but not necessarily relevant right now when a client's quote and your daughter's essay are both due first thing in the morning!

So why should these users be interested in free software? Paul Nelson of the Riverdale School District in Portland, Oregon coined the now famous phrase "It's free. It works. Duh..." That about sums it up for these users. Aside from the freedoms of free software there's the simple fact that much of it is available at no cost. This means that the cost of additional computing capabilities for anyone is vastly reduced. I bought quite a capable system (sans monitor) in March 2004 for $325 cad. With a $50 used monitor and a free Linux distribution the machine is now in use with a full range of desktop, development and server software to handle whatever tasks come its way.