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Free software is software that is distributed with a license that authorizes its users to run the software for any purpose, to redistribute copies of, and to examine, study, and modify the source code. The term free software was coined in 1983, with free denoting the broad freedom that the licence gives users, rather than being free-of-charge (i.e., freeware). Alternative terms for free software include software libre, libre software, open source software, and, free and open source software (abbreviated FOSS and F/OSS).

The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary goal of developing free software replacements for the proprietary software that society had come to rely upon. Examples of well-known free software packages include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice, and, on network servers, FreeBSD, 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 is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world. The latest stable release of Audacity is 1.2.6, released on 15 November 2006. As of 03 May 2009, it was the 6th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with 59 million downloads

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Terminology

Although there was earlier free software, 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 what they called open source software. To this end, they founded the Open Source Initiative, which espoused different goals and a different philosophy from Stallman's.

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