In order to understand the GNU General Public License, first you have to understand what free software means. Free Software means software that respects the users’ freedom. Software that’s not free is proprietary software. Non-free software, user subjugating software, is distributed in a social system that keeps the users the divided and helpless. Divided because every user is forbidden to share the program with anyone else and helpless because the users don’t have the source code, so they can’t change it, they have no control over it, and they can’t even verify independently what it’s really doing. It may have malicious features, quite often it does, and the users may not even be able to tell what malicious features it has.
Link: fsfeurope.org
Category:
- Free Software
