There is a rather common misconception that all open-source software is considered freedom software.
When people speak of "open-source" software, they are referring to a computer program's source code being "open" to the public. This means that anyone is able to review the code that the program is executing on the machine.
While it is important that our software is open-source, it is important to know the difference between "open-source" and "freedom software". The open-source movement aim's to achieve one thing, while the freedom software movement aims to achieve another.
One very important distinction:
All freedom software is completely open-source, but not all open-source software is completely free.When we speak of "freedom software", we mean free as in 'freedom', not free as in 'free food'.
In order for a piece of software to be considered free (as in freedom) it needs to give users the 4 essential freedoms:
- Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this.)
- Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
- Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this.)
If just one of these freedoms is not met, the piece of software in question is not truly free. Instead, it is considered to be restricted, non-free, proprietary software.
Quote from Richard Stallman:
"In practice, open source stands for criteria a little looser than those of free software. As far as we know, all existing released free software source code would qualify as open source. Nearly all open source software is free software, but there are exceptions.
First, some open-source licenses are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free licenses. For example, Open Watcom is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately. Fortunately, few programs use such licenses.
Second, the criteria for open source are concerned solely with the licensing of the source code. However, people often describe an executable as “open source,” because its source code is available that way. That causes confusion in paradoxical situations where the source code is open source (and free) but the executable itself is nonfree."
As many of you have probably gathered, our decentralized protocol is made entirely of free (as in freedom) software. Every line of bitcoin's code is completely and totally free. All users are allotted the four freedoms mentioned above. Everyone is free to run the program as they wish (freedom 0), everyone is free to study how the code works and change it so that it operates as you wish (freedom 1), everyone has the freedom to redistribute copies of the code (freedom 2), and everyone has the freedom to distribute their modified copies of the bitcoin core software (freedom 3).
Proprietary software severely limits users and what they are able to do with any given program. This is why we need to advocate free (as in freedom) software beyond our use/advocation of bitcoin.
Instead of just freeing our money, let's aim to free our digital lives as well.
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For more information on the goals of freedom software, visit fsf dot org.