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Introduction

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Free software is software that is distributed in a manner that allows its users to run the software for any purpose, to redistribute copies of, and to examine, study, and modify, the source code. The term was coined in 1983, with 'free' denoting the broad freedom given to users, rather than software that is free of charge (which is freeware). Alternative terms for free software include 'software libre' and 'free and open source software' (or 'FOSS'). open source is not always free, though. The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary goal of developing free software replacements for the proprietary software that was at that point heavily relied upon. Projects born from the movement include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice, FreeBSD, and, on network servers, Samba, and the Apache web server.

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Audacity is a digital audio editor and recording application. Audacity is cross-platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD. Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University; Mazzoni now works at Google, but he is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world. The latest beta release of Audacity is 1.3.14 (beta), and the current stable version, 1.2.6, was released on 13 November 2006. As of February 2011^[update], it was the 54th most popular download from SourceForge.

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Terminology

Although there was free software before, in 1983 Richard Stallman launched the free software movement and founded the Free Software Foundation to promote the movement and to publish its own definition of free software. Others published alternative definitions of free software, including the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Berkeley Software Distribution-based operating system communities.

In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond began a campaign to market open source software and founded the Open Source Initiative, which espoused different goals and a different philosophy from Stallman's.

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