Free software term has caused a bit of an issue in the english speaking community because Free as in freedom is the same as free as in zero cost.
Free software in this case is about a licence that guarantee the user freedoms to use, modify and share the software without a consent of the developer house.
Usually there are more than meets the eye when it comes to freeware. In the mid 90’s an explosion of comercial freeware which includes also spyware in the software. As a user or developer there was no way on telling whether this software was benign or not. A famous examples was the infamous weather bug which also run cycles that did monitoring on the user computer.
Free software is fundamentally different in this aspect as developers can alert users whenever this software has such porpouses.
Post Comments