History of free software

In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU project after feeling frustrated with the effects of cultural change-user computer industry and users. Development of software GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was established in October 1985. He introduced a free software definition and "copyleft", which is a licensing model that ensures freedom in the use of free software for everyone.

Free software is a big effort from the international world to produce software used by individuals, large corporations and government agencies. Free software has a high market penetration in the Internet server applications such as Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database system, and PHP scripting language. Large package of free software is also available as GNU / Linux and FreeBSD. Developer-free software developers have also created free versions of desktop applications that are commonly used as a web browser, office package and a multimedia player. But it should be noted that in many categories, free software that is used for individual users or home users has only a small portion of the market is more dominated by a paid software. Most free software is distributed online and free, or off-line with the payment of a fee for distribution.

Economic benefits of the free software model has been recognized by several large companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Many companies core business is not within the information technology sector choose free software as their Internet solution because of low investment and freedom for customization.

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