WIKIREADER FREE SOFTWARE AND FREE CONTENTS A COLLECTION OF ARTICLES FROM WIKIPEDIA, THE FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA Last change: June 28th, 2004 W I K I M E D I A F O U N D A T I O N IMPRINT Authors: The volunteer writers of the english Wikipedia Editor: Thomas R. "TomK32" Koll Notable Wikipedians for this WikiReader: Used fonts: FreeSerif und FreeMono Cover: Last change in this edition: June 28th 2004 at 22:40 CEST Webdress of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org ISSN (Onlineedtion): 1613-7752 ISSN (Printedtion): not known yet A complete list of used articles and the names of all registered authors who worked on these articles can be found in the appendix. WIKIREADER INTERNET 1 ON WIKIPEDIA Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia which was started to give everyone a free source of knowledge which you not only can read but also extend in form of writing for it. On the website http://en.wikipedia.org you can not only find the current articles of Wikipedia but you can also start writing imediately without registration or identification. With this revolutionary method more than 700.000 articles were written since 2001 in more than 40 languages, and it's growing faster. In some languages Wikipedia is the first ency- clopedia ever. Since 2003 the Wikimedia Foundation is taking care of running the farm of webservers and also hosts and supports other projects like the multilinugual dictionary Wiktionary and the textbooks project WikiBooks. ON WIKIREADER WikiReader is a randomly published series of collections of Wikipedia articles, a detai- led overview over a certain topic presented in a editored form. It don't claim to be com- plete or even perfect but is more or less a "snapshot" of the topic. We encourage our readers to do further researches, include their results into Wikipedia and give new impluses for the next edition of this WikiReader. The first WikiReader, on the topic "Schweden", was published at the German Wikipe- dia in February 2004 by Thomas Karcher and others followed. ON WIKIREADER THIS WIKIREADER The "WikiReader Free Software and Free Contents" is the first one published in English, still by a German Wikipedian, but surely soon to be editored by native English speakers. The WikiReader's target is to give a overview on the various aspects of free software and contents which started in the 1970s and became a counter-movement to propietary software and restrictive copyright in the late 1990s. COPYRIGHT Like Wikipedia itself, this WikiReader is published under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) which can be found in the appendix. You may, no you shall copy this WikiReader according to the terms of the license. The license also can be found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html 2 WIKIREADER INTERNET TABLE OF CONTENTS Imprint.....................................................1 Non-government systems of IP On Wikipedia..........................................2 protection.........................................51 On WikiReader.......................................2 Closed source........................................53 On WikiReader this WikiReader.............2 Shared Source.......................................54 Copyright................................................2 Software Patent.....................................55 In the US..........................................56 EFINITION OF ERMS D T .....................5 In Europe.........................................58 Open Content..........................................5 Origin...............................................59 Free software...........................................5 Opposition to Software Patents........64 Open Source..........................................10 Dealing with Software Patents.........68 Source Code..........................................10 Copyleft.................................................12 IMPORTANT PERSONS.....................71 Open Patent...........................................15 Richard Stallman...................................71 Open Hardware.....................................16 Founding GNU................................72 The Cathedral and the Bazaar...............17 Eric S. Raymond...................................74 SOFTWARE LICENSES.....................18 LINUS TORVALDS.........................77 Open-source licenses.............................18 Tux........................................................80 Free software licenses...........................19 Eben Moglen.........................................82 MIT License..........................................19 Alan Cox...............................................83 BSD license...........................................20 Donald Knuth........................................83 BSD and GPL licensing........................21 Bruce Perens.........................................85 Larry Wall.............................................85 ONTENT ICENSES C L ......................23 Guido van Rossum................................86 Public Domain.......................................23 Brian Behlendorf...................................87 Public domain and the Internet........26 Miguel de Icaza.....................................88 GNU Free Documentation License.......28 Creative Commons License..................29 GENERAL MOVEMENTS..................91 Hacker...................................................91 ON REE ICENCES N -F L ....................31 Hacker community................................98 Copyright..............................................31 Hacker culture.......................................98 Fair Use.................................................36 Hacker Manifesto................................100 Practical effect of fair use defense...39 Open source movement.......................101 Fair use on the Internet....................40 Fair Dealing...........................................41 IMPORTANT ORANISATIONS..........105 Australia...........................................42 GNU....................................................105 Canada.............................................42 Open Source Initiative.........................108 United Kingdom..............................44 Open Source Development Network...109 Intellectual Property..............................45 Free Software Foundation...................109 WIKIREADER INTERNET 3 Free Software Foundation Europe.......112 Wizards of OS.....................................115 Free Software Foundation India..........113 PPENDIX Creative Commons..............................113 A ..................................117 Authors................................................117 IMPORTANT CONFERENCES AND Used articles........................................117 EXPOSTIONS................................115 GNU Free Documentation Licence.....118 LinuxTag.............................................115 4 WIKIREADER INTERNET DEFINITION OF TERMS OPEN CONTENT Open content, coined by analogy with open source, describes any kind of creative work (for example, articles, pictures, audio, video, etc.) that is published under a copyright li- cense, or in the public domain, in a format that explicitly allows the copying of the in- formation. One example is the GNU Free Documentation License, which is used by Wikipedia and Nupedia. "Open content" is also sometimes used to describe content that can be modified by anyone. Of course, this is not without prior review by other partici- pating parties - but there is no closed group like a commercial encyclopedia publisher which is responsible for all the editing. Just as open source software is sometimes described simply as Free Software (not to be confused with Freeware), open content materials can be more briefly described as free materials. But not every open content is free in the GNU GPL sense (for instance the Open Directory). Some licenses attempt to maximize the freedom of all potential recipi- ents in the future, while others maximize the freedom of the initial recipient. FREE SOFTWARE The term free software is used in essentially two different ways: 1. Software that can be used, copied, studied and modified and redistributed by the user; 2. Software which may be copied and used without payment, also referred to as free- ware (or gratis software by advocates of the first variety). These definitions may conflict, and a piece of software that is free in the first sense may not be free in the second, and vice versa. Amongst software developers and free and open source software enthusiasts, the first sense is traditionally called "free as in speech", while the second is called "free as in beer". In this context, the term "free software" more commonly refers to the first sense. Advocates of "free as in speech" software call the second type "gratis", which translates to the "free" of "free beer," because there is no charge to receive a copy. In many languages the terms for free as in freedom and free as in "free beer" is diffe- rent; in French, for example, "libre" translates to "free" in the sense of "freedom". Hence, free software of the "free speech" type is sometimes called "software libre", from the French "logiciel libre" and the Spanish "software libre". WIKIREADER INTERNET 5 Free software of the first type is often made available online without charge, or availa- ble offline for the cost of distribution; however, this is not required, and free software can also be sold for profit. FREE SOFTWARE AS IN "FREE SPEECH" Developers in the 1970s frequently shared their software in a manner similar to the prin-