Lessons from the Free Software Session

On Monday, 22 August 2005, John David Stone of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science hosted a session for first-year students on free software. Although that sessions is not required of all Grinnell students, I required my Tutorial students to attend and to record one key point each. You will find these points below. The words are often the students, but I will admit that when students had similar answers, I often combined answers and that I also took other liberties with their writings.

Points recorded by: Trevor Austin, Alex Conlon, Ted Cooper, Azul Freedom, Chris Gerpheide, Scott McIntyre, Matthew Montemore, Emmanuel Munoz, Siddarth Srivastava, and Sam Tape.

Students not listed were excused from this assignment because of other commitments.

• The differences between free software and proprietary software are more political than operational.
• Free software succeeds only with the support and participation of its users, who are responsible for creating, sharing, and improving the software.
• Free software, as used in MathLAN, enables the ability to run customizable programs and use those programs to study and/or share with others.
• The free software movement began in 1984 when Richard Stallman created the program emacs. [Sam notes that emacs existed long before 1984, but that the first free version was created about then.]
• Free software is really cool and EULAs suck.
• Mathematics and Computer Science have their own LAN where things are run on their own terms.
• Mr. Stone is a dedicated, privately apt dude.
• The Internet and newsgroups were the vessel that carried the free software movement to where it is today.
• Microsoft is evil and greedy.
• Free software doesn't mean that the software costs no money per se, but that it is unrestriced. However, this often means that one can get the software for no cost.
• The word free in this particular case, suggests not only the conventional monetary meaning of the word, but also introduces the concept of free rights for the user.
• Free software provides many rights, including the right to copy and the right to improve.