The internet has a lot of options for the user. Introduction In every individual school and university grade student, assignments are an everyday fact. The positive thing is you wouldn't have to be Shakespeare, necessarily. Instructors and instructors are less worried about yo...

Writing informational articles for the Web is a good way to establish oneself as an authority on any topic. Creating articles is also very effective in generating traffic for your website. However, deceitful authors can plagiarize your work (with very little effort). Read on f...

This morning, I had the pleasure and honour to speak - “as the European voice” - at the FTC hearing on “Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade” (check out the official weblog for more information and summaries of the discussion.) I was asked to report about the legal and re...

I grew up in a community whose other members committed crimes as serious as murder. The city of New York, with its 8 million inhabitants, had hundreds of murders each year, mostly committed by people who lived in the city. Violent assaults and robberies were even more common....

There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers--with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what you want it to do. Free software also gives...

Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece. The GNU Project says, "Please give our project equal mention", but Linus says, "Don't give them a share of the credit; call the whole thing after my n...

While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas. In 1998, some of the people in the free software community began using the term ``open source software'' instead of ``fre...

Apologists for proprietary software like to say, ``free software is a nice dream, but we all know that only the proprietary system can produce reliable products. A bunch of hackers just can't do this.'' Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below,...

Here is a glossary of various categories of software that are often mentioned in discussions of free software. It explains which categories overlap or are part of other categories. Also note Confusing Words which You Might Want to Avoid. This diagram by Chao-Kuei explains the...

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost. Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to char...

The GNU Free Documentation License The biggest deficiency in free operating systems is not in the software--it is the lack of good free manuals that we can include in these systems. Many of our most important programs do not come with full manuals. Documentation is an essentia...

Introduction The existence of software inevitably raises the question of how decisions about its use should be made. For example, suppose one individual who has a copy of a program meets another who would like a copy. It is possible for them to copy the program; who should dec...

We maintain this free software definition to show clearly what must be true about a particular software program for it to be considered free software. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as...