Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software;
the schools of regions of India and Spain now teach all students to
use the free GNU/Linux operating
system. Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical
reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software
community, because nowadays this system and community are more often
spoken of as “open source,”, attributing them to a different
philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software - GNU Project - Free Software Foundat... - 0 views
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In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source.” The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term “free software,” but it soon became associated with philosophical views quite different from those of the free software movement.
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Nearly all open source software is free software. The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.
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How the Linux kernel works | TuxRadar Linux - 0 views
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The kernel makes its services available to the application programs that run on it through a large collection of entry points, known technically as system calls.
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From a programmer's viewpoint, these look just like ordinary function calls, although in reality a system call involves a distinct switch in the operating mode of the processor from user space to kernel space. Together, the repertoire of system calls provides a 'Linux virtual machine', which can be thought of as an abstraction of the underlying hardware.
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An even less visible function of the kernel, even to programmers, is memory management. Each process runs under the illusion that it has an address space (a valid range of memory addresses) to call its own.
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Why Upgrade to GPLv3 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) - 0 views
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Software patents are a vicious and absurd system that puts all software developers in danger of being sued by companies they have never heard of, as well as by all the megacorporations in the field. Large programs typically combine thousands of ideas, so it is no surprise if they implement ideas covered by hundreds of patents. Megacorporations collect thousands of patents, and use those patents to bully smaller developers. Patents already obstruct free software development.
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