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wxie

31 May 2024

Article published by: wxie

Date of publication: 31 May 2024

title: Introduction to Free Software description: On 2020-07-26 I gave this speech as the second P1-level-1 speech in Yulife club of Toastmaster. —

Dear Fellow members, Distinguished guests,

Good morning.

Today I will introduce the concept of Free Software to you. I guess all of you have used some software. right? Here is a question. Who can tell me what software is?

Yes, you are right. Software is the programs that run in your computers, in your smart phones, and in many other devices. When you double click the icon of a program, it runs. When you input the name of a program in the command line interface, it runs. Software can do a lot of things for you, like editing an article, listening to the music, taking a photo, surfing the internet, and so on and so forth. In general, we call this computation: it means software does computation for us.

Technically, software is developed by engineers in the form of source code. Source code is the computer language for human to read and understand just like English. Then the source code is translated into machine code using some software. Machine code is the computer language designed for the machines. Computers understand machine code so they can execute the program. However, it is extremely difficult for engineers to read the machine code.

Now we know what software is. Who can tell me the Chinese translation of Free Software?

No, you are wrong. The Chinese translation of Free Software is 自由软件，not 免费软件。免费软件 is gratis software.The English word free has 2 meanings: one for gratis, the other for freedom. The free in Free software is as the free in free speech, not the free in free lunch. Free Software is about freedom, not about price.

Officially, Free Software is defined as a software that gives its users - you - 4 essential freedoms:

Freedom 0: you are free to run the software as you wish for any purpose. No one can limit why you run the software and how you run the software.
Freedom 1: you are free to study how the software works and make changes as you wish. This means you must have access to the source code to study the software. How many software do you have source code?
Freedom 2: you are free to distribute the original software. Sharing knowledge makes human kind survive and thrive. Sharing software is sharing knowledge. It is ethical and natural to share software.
Freedom 3: you are free to distribute you modified version of software as you have done with freedom 1. If you understand Freedom 2, you would understand Freedom 3 - it makes software evolve and become better.

In brief, Free software means user can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

Dear friends, next time before you run a program, please ask yourselves: - Is the software a free software? Does it give me the 4 essential freedoms? This is the most important thing to ask.

Thank you.

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