Free software

:This article is about Free Software as defined by the sociopolitical Free Software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. For other uses, see free software (disambiguation).

Examples of free software

The amount of free software is large and increasing.

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Notable free software projects:

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• Operating system kernels: Linux, BSD, and Darwin
• GCC compilers, GDB debugger and C libraries
• Servers: BIND name server, Sendmail mail transport, Apache web server, and Samba file server
• Relational database systems: MySQL and PostgreSQL.
• Programming languages: Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl.
• GUI related: X Window System, GNOME and KDE desktop environments.
• OpenOffice.org office suite, Mozilla web browsers and the GIMP graphics editor
• Typesetting and document preparation systems TeX and LaTeX

See the Free Software Directory http://www.gnu.org/directory for a larger list.

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Much free software supports the non-free Microsoft Windows or non-free Unix platforms, and non-free software can support free platforms, although purists prefer all-free software on a free platform such as GNU/Linux.

Related Topics:
Microsoft Windows - Unix - GNU/Linux

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Free software packages constitute a software ecosystem where software provides services, resulting in mutual benefit: for instance, the Apache web server handling the HTTP protocol, using mod_python to provide dynamic content.

Related Topics:
Software ecosystem - Mod_python

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