Free software

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This is a policy term on the list of policy terms.

The definition of free software is maintained by the Free Software Foundation .org which is also responsible for the most common license, the GPL, and the most common open content license, the GFDL. These have had a profound influence on the evolution of net and web media, not least through the GFDL corpus namespace that is now the primary precedent for what things are called on the net.

Technically, the distinction between open source and free software is that free software is share alike to everyone - the same license under which the use is received applies to anyone who is granted access to an improved version, and no restrictions on this may be applied. By contrast, generic share alike as in some Common Content licenses need not be universal (shared to everyone) and may restrict use, e.g. by commercial users as in the CC-by-nc-sa license. Generic open source permits improvement and patenting or separate copyrighting or other restrictions on the improved versions, and so is not share-alike at all.