Welcome Guide
Welcome to Boğaziçi University Free Software and Open Knowledge Society! We will help you understand, use and contribute to free software and open knowledge resources, with specific focus on Boğaziçi. Read more about us here.
What is FOSS?
Section titled “What is FOSS?”Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) refers to software that is libre (free as in freedom) and open (with readable source code). The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers a piece of software free if its users have these 4 freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. 1
Free software is software that respects these freedoms respects your autonomy as a user. Now, we have many softwares that supply these freedoms, but can we execute on them? We want to help students of Boğaziçi to gain the resources and abilities to execute their freedoms. To learn more about free software, check out the FSF’s official definition.
Footnotes
Section titled “Footnotes”-
The reason they are numbered 0, 1, 2 and 3 is historical. Around 1990 there were three freedoms, numbered 1, 2 and 3. Then the FSF realized that the freedom to run the program needed to be mentioned explicitly. It was clearly more basic than the other three, so it properly should precede them. Rather than renumbering the others, they made it freedom 0. (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#f1) ↩