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THE FREE SOFTWARE PORTAL (estd. 2005)
Free software is software which can be run, studied, examined, modified, and redistributed by everyone who has a copy. This type of software, which was given its current name in 1983, has also come to be known as "open-source software", "software libre or libre software", "FOSS", and "FLOSS". The term "Free" refers to it being unfettered, rather than being free-of-charge. In this sense, it is the user who is free.
The free software movement was launched in 1983 with the primary tactic to write free software replacements for the non-free software that society relied on. Examples of well-known free software packages include GNU, the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org, and on network servers, FreeBSD and Apache.
To coordinate with others on free software issues, see WikiProject Free Software.
Below are tasks that you can help with. On the left are general tasks, where we list articles that need help but for which there is no plan of action, just a general call for attention. On the right we list specific tasks where there is a suggested plan of action, but we need someone with the right knowledge to implement the plan.
If you would like to help, here are some suggestions for things to do. The date in parenthesis is the date on which the task was added.
- (2008-03-19) The article Hacker (free and open source software) has some sections which should be rewritten with a more "detached" style, and needs more references. Even the title is not perfect.
- (2007-10-28) The timeline of FSF's and Debian's free software definitions needs to be constructed (see Talk:The Free Software Definition#Timeline: FSD and DFSG)
- (2007-09-18) The European Union v. Microsoft (the anti-trust case) article needs to add mentions of FSFE, free software, and Samba.
- (2007-09-17) The GNU Compiler Collection article contains no information about how fast/slow or big/small the outputted programs are.
- (2007-08-13) GPL linking exception - this article isn't yet linked to by the articles about projects that use this exception, and the article itself contains quite a few tags complaining about original research or mistakes. Care sought.
- (2007-05-14) The GNU/Linux naming controversy, Emacs, Common Unix Printing System, Ubuntu (operating system) and PaX articles were formerly featured articles, but have since had that status revoked. Maybe it would be easy to get them back up to Featured Article quality.
- (2007-04-13) The Player Project needs expansion, particularly someone with knowledge of the project to write about its history, goals, features without turning it back into an advert.
- (2007-04-11) The dual-licensing article needs some clean-up (this is half-done now)
- (2007-03-22) The OpenMoko article is quite weak for such an interesting free software topic. Help sought.
- (2007-03-03) Patents and free software is a consolidation of previous stubs - it's new, so it needs some help and some review
- (2007-02-07) The History of free software article is new and seeks contributions, particularly if you have links to essays by old-times for info about free software in the 80s and 70s, as well as 90s and 60s.
- (2007-01-24) Some cleanup, and some aggregation, and probably some merging, is needed for
Autotools, GNU build system, and GNU toolchain
- (2006-12-18) Add a section on how to contribute to the opensource comunity. This should cover how to create a program from existing technologies, languages and other opensource programs, how to fix a bug, write documentation, etc.
- (2006-10-10) Many articles containing phrases such as "free software licence" or "free software community", when it is usually better to link to "free software licence" and "free software community" instead of the main free software article.
- (2006-09-18) Free software should be mentioned in Software engineering
- (2006-09-13) Free software community needs more work
- (2006-08-25) For each article about a free software package, there should be a link to the licence information.
- (2006-08-22) The Category:Free software companies category is new and could use some help.
Category:Copyleft licensing needs help too, as does Category:Emacs users.
- (2006-06-15) add {{free-software-stub}} to free software related articles which are stubs
- (2006-06-06) Work is being done to create useful sub-categories in Category:Free software. This requires help to move articles from Category:free software into the sub-categories.
- (2006-04-12) Add the
{{portal|Free software|Free Software Portal Logo.svg}} tag to articles about, or related to, free software.
- (2005-12-30) The Copyleft article contains information duplicated elsewhere, a review would be good
Purge server cache
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