The concept of free software was introduced in 1984 by Richard
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Software qualifies as free
software if its distribution license guarantees the freedom to run the
program for any purpose, to redistribute copies, to study it and adapt
it to the user’s needs, and to change it and redistribute it once
modified. (Stallman 1984).
The free software community that has built itself around those
principles has been involved in the development of the free operating
system GNU/Linux, a completely free Unixlike operating system using the
GNU system, Linux kernel and other free software packages.
Most parts of GNU/Linux are distributed under a particular license,
the GNU General Public License. This license guarantees and protects the
user’s freedom by defining the
conditions under which the software and its source code must be made
available, as access to the source code is a precondition for
realization of the user’s freedom.
The development model of free software, where the availability of the
source code and the right to modify and redistribute it allows review of
the source code by many independent developers, has also proven to
produce much more reliable software. A consequence of this recognized
stability can be seen in the wide adoption of GNU/Linux to run the World
Wide Web and other Internet servers.
This very precise description of the relationship between GNU/Linux
and the Free Software Community has been adopted from the paper "Demudi:
The Debian Multimedia Distribution" and was originally created by
Francois Déchelle (IRCAM - Centre Pompidou, Paris, France,
<dechelle@ircam.fr<), Günter Geiger (XDV, Wien, Austria,
<geiger@epy.co.at>), and Dave Phillips <dlphilp@bright.net>.
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