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78-479: Openbox is a free , stacking window manager for the X Window System , licensed under the GNU General Public License . Originally derived from Blackbox 0.65.0 (a C++ project), Openbox has been completely re-written in the C programming language and since version 3.0 is no longer based upon any code from Blackbox. Since at least 2010, it has been considered feature complete, bug free and

156-428: A negative or positive liberty . Due to their restrictions on distribution, not everyone considers copyleft licenses to be free. Conversely, a permissive license may provide an incentive to create non-free software by reducing the cost of developing restricted software. Since this is incompatible with the spirit of software freedom, many people consider permissive licenses to be less free than copyleft licenses. There

234-418: A company can restrict the parties to which it sells but it cannot prevent a buyer from reselling the product. Software licensing agreements usually prohibit resale, enabling the company to maximize revenue. Traditionally, software was distributed in the form of binary object code that could not be understood or modified by the user, but could be downloaded and run. The user bought a perpetual license to use

312-505: A completed project. Occasional maintenance is done to keep it working, but only if needed. Openbox is designed to be small, fast, and fully compliant with the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) and Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH). It supports many features such as menus by which the user can control applications or which display various dynamic information. Openbox

390-726: A component of their proprietary software. The decision to use open-source software, or even engage with open-source projects to improve existing open-source software, is typically a pragmatic business decision. When proprietary software is in direct competition with an open-source alternative, research has found conflicting results on the effect of the competition on the proprietary product's price and quality. For decades, some companies have made servicing of an open-source software product for enterprise users as their business model. These companies control an open-source software product, and instead of charging for licensing or use, charge for improvements, integration, and other servicing. Software as

468-529: A copy of the free application itself. Fees are usually charged for distribution on compact discs and bootable USB drives, or for services of installing or maintaining the operation of free software. Development of large, commercially used free software is often funded by a combination of user donations, crowdfunding , corporate contributions, and tax money. The SELinux project at the United States National Security Agency

546-414: A customer agreed if they did not return the product within a specified interval. More recently, EULAs are most commonly found as clickwrap or browsewrap where the user's clicks or continued browsing are taken as a sign of agreement. As a result of the end of physical constraints, length increased. Most EULAs have been designed so that it is very difficult to read and understand them, but easy to agree to

624-410: A drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $ 60 billion per year. Eric S. Raymond argued that the term free software is too ambiguous and intimidating for the business community. Raymond promoted the term open-source software as a friendlier alternative for the business and corporate world. Software license A software license is a legal instrument governing

702-561: A fee. The Free Software Foundation encourages selling free software. As the Foundation has written, "distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!". For example, the FSF's own recommended license (the GNU GPL ) states that "[you] may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for

780-450: A fee." Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated in 2001 that "open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." This misunderstanding is based on a requirement of copyleft licenses (like the GPL) that if one distributes modified versions of software, they must release

858-489: A lack of source code, there can exist additional obstacles keeping users from exercising freedom over a piece of software, such as software patents and digital rights management (more specifically, tivoization ). Free software can be a for-profit, commercial activity or not. Some free software is developed by volunteer computer programmers while other is developed by corporations; or even by both. Although both definitions refer to almost equivalent corpora of programs,

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936-481: A particular version of the software. Software as service (SaaS) vendors—who have the majority market share in application software as of 2023 —rarely offer perpetual licenses. SaaS licenses are usually temporary and charged on a pay-per-usage or subscription basis, although other revenue models such as freemium are also used. For customers, the advantages of temporary licenses include reduced upfront cost, increased flexibility, and lower overall cost compared to

1014-511: A permissive license. Some weak copyleft licenses can be used under the GPL and are said to be GPL-compatible. GPL software can only be used under the GPL or AGPL. Free and open-source software licenses have been successfully enforced in civil court since the mid-2000s. Courts have found that distributing software indicates acceptance of the license's terms. However, developers typically achieve compliance without lawsuits. Social pressures , such as

1092-413: A perpetual license. In some cases, the steep one-time cost demanded by sellers of traditional software were out of the reach of smaller businesses , but pay-per-use SaaS models makes the software affordable. Initially, end-user license agreements (EULAs) were printed on either the shrinkwrap packaging encasing the product (see shrink-wrap contract ) or a piece of paper. The license often stipulated that

1170-813: A remark distinguishing libre (freedom) software from gratis (zero price) software, the Free Software Foundation says: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in ' free speech ', not as in 'free beer ' ". ( See Gratis versus libre . ) In the late 1990s, other groups published their own definitions that describe an almost identical set of software. The most notable are Debian Free Software Guidelines published in 1997, and The Open Source Definition , published in 1998. The BSD -based operating systems, such as FreeBSD , OpenBSD , and NetBSD , do not have their own formal definitions of free software. Users of these systems generally find

1248-571: A significant part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of dot-com companies . Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use; free software is a pure public good rather than a private good . Companies that contribute to free software increase commercial innovation . "We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that

1326-498: A small set of licenses. The most popular of these licenses are: The Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licenses that they find to comply with their own definitions of free software and open-source software respectively: The FSF list is not prescriptive: free-software licenses can exist that the FSF has not heard about, or considered important enough to write about. So it

1404-419: Is a matter of controversy and is limited in some jurisdictions. Service-level agreements are another type of software license where the vendor agrees to provide a level of service to the purchaser, often backed by financial penalties. Copyleft is a type of free license that mandates derivative works to be licensed. The other types of free license lack this requirement: for permissive licenses , attribution

1482-536: Is also in the public domain, or otherwise available without restrictions. Proprietary software uses restrictive software licences or EULAs and usually does not provide users with the source code. Users are thus legally or technically prevented from changing the software, and this results in reliance on the publisher to provide updates, help, and support. ( See also vendor lock-in and abandonware ). Users often may not reverse engineer , modify, or redistribute proprietary software. Beyond copyright law, contracts and

1560-617: Is an example of a federally funded free-software project. Proprietary software, on the other hand, tends to use a different business model, where a customer of the proprietary application pays a fee for a license to legally access and use it. This license may grant the customer the ability to configure some or no parts of the software themselves. Often some level of support is included in the purchase of proprietary software, but additional support services (especially for enterprise applications) are usually available for an additional fee. Some proprietary software vendors will also customize software for

1638-466: Is biased by counting more vulnerabilities for the free software systems, since their source code is accessible and their community is more forthcoming about what problems exist as a part of full disclosure , and proprietary software systems can have undisclosed societal drawbacks, such as disenfranchising less fortunate would-be users of free programs. As users can analyse and trace the source code, many more people with no commercial constraints can inspect

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1716-451: Is debate over the security of free software in comparison to proprietary software, with a major issue being security through obscurity . A popular quantitative test in computer security is to use relative counting of known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products that lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available. Free software advocates strongly believe that this methodology

1794-411: Is made available for noncommercial use only is not considered open source. Sun Microsystems ' noncommercial-only Java Research License was rejected by the open-source community, and in 2006 the company released most of Java under the GPL. Since 1989, a variety of open-source licenses for software have been created. Choosing an open-source software license has grown increasingly difficult due to

1872-495: Is not endorsed by the FSF and does not use Linux-libre, it is also a popular distribution available without kernel blobs by default since 2011. The Linux community uses the term "blob" to refer to all nonfree firmware in a kernel whereas OpenBSD uses the term to refer to device drivers. The FSF does not consider OpenBSD to be blob free under the Linux community's definition of blob. Selling software under any free-software licence

1950-601: Is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to the lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages. Most companies in the software business include free software in their commercial products if the licenses allow that. Free software is generally available at no cost and can result in permanently lower TCO ( total cost of ownership ) compared to proprietary software . With free software, businesses can fit software to their specific needs by changing

2028-415: Is permissible, as is commercial use. This is true for licenses with or without copyleft . Since free software may be freely redistributed, it is generally available at little or no fee. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as customization, accompanying hardware, support, training, integration, or certification. Exceptions exist however, where the user is charged to obtain

2106-521: Is possible for a license to be free and not in the FSF list. The OSI list only lists licenses that have been submitted, considered and approved. All open-source licenses must meet the Open Source Definition in order to be officially recognized as open source software. Free software, on the other hand, is a more informal classification that does not rely on official recognition. Nevertheless, software licensed under licenses that do not meet

2184-613: Is summarized at the Debian web site. It is rare that a license announced as being in-compliance with the FSF guidelines does not also meet the Open Source Definition , although the reverse is not necessarily true (for example, the NASA Open Source Agreement is an OSI-approved license, but non-free according to FSF). There are different categories of free software. Proponents of permissive and copyleft licenses disagree on whether software freedom should be viewed as

2262-580: Is the standard window manager in LXDE , and often set as the default for LXQt . It is used in Linux distributions such as BunsenLabs , ArchBang , Lubuntu , Trisquel and Manjaro . The creator and primary author of Openbox is Dana Jansens of Carleton University in Ottawa , Ontario , Canada. Openbox provides a right-click (or any other key-binding ) "root menu" on the desktop, and allows users to configure

2340-458: Is typically the only requirement, and public-domain-equivalent licenses have no restrictions. The proliferation of open-source licenses has compounded license compatibility issues, but all share some features: allowing redistribution and derivative works under the same license, unrestricted access to the source code , and nondiscrimination between different uses—in particular, allowing commercial use. The source code (or compiled binaries in

2418-756: The Apache web server; and the Sendmail mail transport agent. Other influential examples include the Emacs text editor; the GIMP raster drawing and image editor; the X Window System graphical-display system; the LibreOffice office suite; and the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems. From the 1950s up until the early 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the software freedoms associated with free software, which

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2496-830: The GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. He developed a free software definition and the concept of " copyleft ", designed to ensure software freedom for all. Some non-software industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development process; scientists, for example, are looking towards more open development processes, and hardware such as microchips are beginning to be developed with specifications released under copyleft licenses ( see

2574-693: The Linux kernel and other device drivers motivated some developers in Ireland to launch gNewSense , a Linux-based distribution with all the binary blobs removed. The project received support from the Free Software Foundation and stimulated the creation, headed by the Free Software Foundation Latin America , of the Linux-libre kernel. As of October 2012 , Trisquel is the most popular FSF endorsed Linux distribution ranked by Distrowatch (over 12 months). While Debian

2652-661: The OpenCores project, for instance ). Creative Commons and the free-culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement. In 1983, Richard Stallman , longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , announced the GNU Project, saying that he had become frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users. Software development for

2730-407: The proliferation of licenses , many of which are only trivially distinct. Many licenses are incompatible with each other, hampering the goals of the free software movement. Translation issues, ambiguity in licensing terms, and incompatibility of some licenses with the law in certain jurisdictions compounds the problem. Although downloading an open-source module is quick and easy, complying with

2808-410: The source code was distributed to use these programs. Software was also shared and distributed as printed source code ( Type-in program ) in computer magazines (like Creative Computing , SoftSide , Compute! , Byte , etc.) and books, like the bestseller BASIC Computer Games . By the early 1970s, the picture changed: software costs were dramatically increasing, a growing software industry

2886-401: The source code —the preferred format for making changes—be made available to users of that program. While this is often called "access to source code" or "public availability", the Free Software Foundation (FSF) recommends against thinking in those terms, because it might give the impression that users have an obligation (as opposed to a right) to give non-users a copy of the program. Although

2964-418: The virtual worlds of video games . Most disclaim any liability for harms caused by the product, and prevent the purchaser from accessing the court system to seek a remedy. Furthermore, many EULAs allow the vendor to change the terms at any time and the customer must choose between agreeing or ceasing use of the product, without getting a refund. It is common for EULAs to allow unilateral termination by

3042-557: The Free Software Definition cannot rightly be considered free software. Apart from these two organizations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines . Debian does not publish a list of approved licenses, so its judgments have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives. That

3120-426: The Free Software Foundation recommends using the term "free software" rather than " open-source software " (an alternative, yet similar, concept coined in 1998), because the goals and messaging are quite dissimilar. According to the Free Software Foundation, "Open source" and its associated campaign mostly focus on the technicalities of the public development model and marketing free software to businesses, while taking

3198-631: The GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. An article outlining the project and its goals was published in March 1985 titled the GNU Manifesto . The manifesto included significant explanation of the GNU philosophy, Free Software Definition and " copyleft " ideas. The Linux kernel , started by Linus Torvalds , was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. The first licence

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3276-525: The Internet. Users can easily download and install those applications via a package manager that comes included with most Linux distributions . The Free Software Directory maintains a large database of free-software packages. Some of the best-known examples include Linux-libre , Linux-based operating systems, the GNU Compiler Collection and C library ; the MySQL relational database;

3354-745: The United States, clickwrap or browsewrap licenses were not held to be binding, but since then they often have been. Under the New Digital Content Directive effective in the European Union, EULAs are only enforceable to the extent that they do not breach reasonable consumer expectations. The gap between expectations and the content of EULAs is especially wide when it comes to restrictions on copying and transferring ownership of digital content. Many EULAs contain stipulations that are likely unenforceable depending on

3432-414: The agreed standard. SLAs often cover such aspects as availability, reliability, price, and security using quantifiable metrics. Multi-tier SLAs are common in cloud computing because of the use of different computing services that may be managed by different companies. SLAs in cloud computing are an area under active research as of 2024 . Before the open-source movement in the 1980s, almost all software

3510-421: The bare license interpretation, advocated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a case is brought to court by the copyright holder as copyright infringement . Under the contract interpretation, a case can be brought to court by an involved party as a breach of contract . United States and French courts have tried cases under both interpretations. More than 90 percent of companies use open-source software as

3588-588: The code and find bugs and loopholes than a corporation would find practicable. According to Richard Stallman, user access to the source code makes deploying free software with undesirable hidden spyware functionality far more difficult than for proprietary software. Some quantitative studies have been done on the subject. In 2006, OpenBSD started the first campaign against the use of binary blobs in kernels . Blobs are usually freely distributable device drivers for hardware from vendors that do not reveal driver source code to users or developers. This restricts

3666-487: The company that makes the software, not the employees or contractors who wrote it. The tendency to license proprietary software , rather than sell it, dates from the time period before the existence, then the scope of software copyright protection was clear . These licenses have continued in use after software copyright was recognized in the courts, and are considered to grant the company extra protection compared to copyright law. According to United States federal law ,

3744-492: The ethical issue of user rights very lightly or even antagonistically. Stallman has also stated that considering the practical advantages of free software is like considering the practical advantages of not being handcuffed, in that it is not necessary for an individual to consider practical reasons in order to realize that being handcuffed is undesirable in itself. The FSF also notes that "Open Source" has exactly one specific meaning in common English, namely that "you can look at

3822-399: The form of object code ) of a computer program is protected by copyright law that vests the owner with the exclusive right to copy the code. The underlying ideas or algorithms are not protected by copyright law, but are often treated as a trade secret and concealed by such methods as non-disclosure agreements . Software copyright has been recognized since the mid-1970s and is vested in

3900-409: The government charged that bundled software was anti-competitive . While some software might always be free, there would henceforth be a growing amount of software produced primarily for sale. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began using technical measures (such as only distributing binary copies of computer programs ) to prevent computer users from being able to study or adapt

3978-407: The graphical configuration tools ObConf and obmenu. All mouse and key-bindings can be configured. For example, a user can set: Openbox has a dynamic menu system that uses " pipe menus". A menu item in a piped menu system can accept the standard output of a shell script (or other executable) in order to generate a sub-menu. Because the script runs every time the pointer activates it, and because

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4056-413: The jurisdiction. Software vendors keep these unenforceable provisions in the agreements, perhaps because users rarely resort to the legal system to challenge them. Service-level agreements are often used for enterprise software and guarantee a level of service, such as software performance or time to respond to issue raised by the customer. Many stipulate financial penalties if the service falls short of

4134-421: The licensing terms can be more difficult. The amount of software dependencies means that engineers working on complex projects must often rely on software license management software in order to help them achieve compliance with the licensing terms of open-source components. Many open-source software files do not unambiguously state the license, increasing the difficulties of compliance. When combining code bases,

4212-445: The licensing terms without reading them. Regardless of how easy it is to access, very few consumers read any part of the license agreement. Most assume the terms are unobjectionable or barely notice agreeing while installing the software. Companies take advantage of consumers' inattention to insert provisions into EULAs. Proprietary software is usually offered under a restrictive license that bans copying and reuse and often limits

4290-421: The list, but later added first in the list as it was considered very important. Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible. Thus, free software means that computer users have the freedom to cooperate with whom they choose, and to control the software they use. To summarize this into

4368-426: The original licenses can be maintained for separate components, and the larger work released under a compatible license. This compatibility is often one-way. Public domain content can be used anywhere as there is no copyright claim, but code acquired under any almost any set of terms cannot be waved to the public domain. Permissive licenses can be used within copyleft works, but copyleft material cannot be released under

4446-531: The potential for community backlash, are often sufficient. Cease and desist letters are a common method to bring companies back into compliance, especially in Germany. A long-debated subject within the FOSS community is whether open-source licenses are "bare licenses" or contracts . A bare license is a set of conditions under which actions otherwise restricted by intellectual property laws are permitted. Under

4524-416: The purchaser to using the software on one computer. Source code is rarely available. Derivative software works and reverse engineering are usually explicitly prohibited. Many EULAs allow the vendor to collect information about the user and use it in unrestricted ways. Some EULAs restrict the ability of users to exercise copyright over derivative work made using the software, such as creative creations in

4602-511: The same set of software to be acceptable, but sometimes see copyleft as restrictive. They generally advocate permissive free software licenses , which allow others to use the software as they wish, without being legally forced to provide the source code. Their view is that this permissive approach is more free. The Kerberos , X11 , and Apache software licenses are substantially similar in intent and implementation. There are thousands of free applications and many operating systems available on

4680-422: The script can assess environmental conditions, piped menus enable conditional branching to be built into the menu system. A static menu system as used on most window managers gets its layout once, when the window manager is restarted, and will not have the ability to modify the menu layout depending on environmental factors. Free software The right to study and modify a computer program entails that

4758-435: The shift in climate surrounding the computer world and its users. In his initial declaration of the project and its purpose, he specifically cited as a motivation his opposition to being asked to agree to non-disclosure agreements and restrictive licenses which prohibited the free sharing of potentially profitable in-development software, a prohibition directly contrary to the traditional hacker ethic . Software development for

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4836-520: The software applications as they saw fit. In 1980, copyright law was extended to computer programs. In 1983, Richard Stallman , one of the original authors of the popular Emacs program and a longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , announced the GNU Project , the purpose of which was to produce a completely non-proprietary Unix-compatible operating system, saying that he had become frustrated with

4914-443: The software themselves or by hiring programmers to modify it for them. Free software often has no warranty, and more importantly, generally does not assign legal liability to anyone. However, warranties are permitted between any two parties upon the condition of the software and its usage. Such an agreement is made separately from the free software license. A report by Standish Group estimates that adoption of free software has caused

4992-411: The source and use the same license. This requirement does not extend to other software from the same developer. The claim of incompatibility between commercial companies and free software is also a misunderstanding. There are several large companies, e.g. Red Hat and IBM (IBM acquired RedHat in 2019), which do substantial commercial business in the development of free software. Free software played

5070-529: The source code." It states that while the term "Free Software" can lead to two different interpretations, at least one of them is consistent with the intended meaning unlike the term "Open Source". The loan adjective " libre " is often used to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free" in the English language , and the ambiguity with the older usage of "free software" as public-domain software. ( See Gratis versus libre . ) The first formal definition of free software

5148-401: The spirit of cooperation once prevalent among hackers during the early days of computing. Free software differs from: For software under the purview of copyright to be free, it must carry a software license whereby the author grants users the aforementioned rights. Software that is not covered by copyright law, such as software in the public domain , is free as long as the source code

5226-499: The term "free software" had already been used loosely in the past and other permissive software like the Berkeley Software Distribution released in 1978 existed, Richard Stallman is credited with tying it to the sense under discussion and starting the free software movement in 1983, when he launched the GNU Project : a collaborative effort to create a freedom-respecting operating system , and to revive

5304-497: The use or redistribution of software. Since the 1970s, software copyright has been recognized in the United States. Despite the copyright being recognized, most companies prefer to sell licenses rather than copies of the software because it enables them to enforce stricter terms on redistribution. Very few purchasers read any part of the license, initially shrink-wrap contracts and now most commonly encountered as clickwrap or browsewrap . The enforceability of this kind of license

5382-495: The users' freedom effectively to modify the software and distribute modified versions. Also, since the blobs are undocumented and may have bugs , they pose a security risk to any operating system whose kernel includes them. The proclaimed aim of the campaign against blobs is to collect hardware documentation that allows developers to write free software drivers for that hardware, ultimately enabling all free operating systems to become or remain blob-free. The issue of binary blobs in

5460-412: The vendor for any number of vague reasons or none at all. EULAs, almost always offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis as a non-negotiable condition for using the software, are very far from the prototypical contract where both parties fully understand the terms and agree of their own free will. There has been substantial debate on to what extent the agreements can be considered binding. Before 1996 in

5538-564: The way windows are managed. When a window is minimized, it becomes invisible. To bring windows up again, most use Alt + Tab ↹ or the Desktop menu , accessible by right-clicking. Or, sometimes, by middle-button-clicking. Extending Openbox with other small programs that add icons, taskbars , launchers, eyecandy and others is common. There are only two configuration files, both located in ~/.config/openbox . They are named menu.xml and rc.xml . These can either be edited manually or with

5616-597: Was a proprietary software licence. However, with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License . Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted the attention of volunteer programmers. FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD ) were released as free software when the USL v. BSDi lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995. Also in 1995, The Apache HTTP Server , commonly referred to as Apache,

5694-402: Was competing with the hardware manufacturer's bundled software products (free in that the cost was included in the hardware cost), leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of "free" software bundled with hardware product costs. In United States vs. IBM , filed January 17, 1969,

5772-583: Was proprietary and did not disclose its source code . Open-source licensing is intended to maximize openness and minimize barriers to software use, dissemination, and follow-on innovation. Open-source licenses share a number of key characteristics: The Open Source Initiative vets and approves new open-source licenses that comply with its Open Source Definition . Outside of software, noncommercial-only Creative Commons licenses have become popular among some artists who wish to prevent others from profiting excessively from their work. However, software that

5850-419: Was published by FSF in February 1986. That definition, written by Richard Stallman , is still maintained today and states that software is free software if people who receive a copy of the software have the following four freedoms. The numbering begins with zero, not only as a spoof on the common usage of zero-based numbering in programming languages, but also because "Freedom 0" was not initially included in

5928-476: Was released under the Apache License 1.0 . All free-software licenses must grant users all the freedoms discussed above. However, unless the applications' licenses are compatible, combining programs by mixing source code or directly linking binaries is problematic, because of license technicalities . Programs indirectly connected together may avoid this problem. The majority of free software falls under

6006-679: Was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could." Official statement of the United Space Alliance , which manages the computer systems for the International Space Station (ISS), regarding their May 2013 decision to migrate ISS computer systems from Windows to Linux The economic viability of free software has been recognized by large corporations such as IBM , Red Hat , and Sun Microsystems . Many companies whose core business

6084-407: Was typically public-domain software . Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who welcomed the fact that people were making software that made their hardware useful. Organizations of users and suppliers, for example, SHARE , were formed to facilitate exchange of software. As software was often written in an interpreted language such as BASIC ,

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