Malaysian Open Source Centre

THE FREE SOFTWARE PORTAL

Free software is software which can be run, studied, examined, modified, and redistributed by everyone who has a copy. This type of software, which was given its current name in 1983, has also come to be known as "open-source software", "software libre" or "libre software", "FOSS", and "FLOSS". The term "Free" refers to it being unfettered, rather than being free-of-charge. In this sense, it is the user who is free.

The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary tactic 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 and the Apache web server.