Introduction to Free Software - SELF | Sharing Knowledge about ...

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tional) and Morfeo (in Spain). In both cases, a group of companies has agreed
to develop a set of free systems that are of interest to them, and decided to
distribute it as free software.
In other cases, companies have actively sought to collaborate in free pro-
jects promoted by volunteers, or tried to make volunteers collaborate with
their own free projects. The GNOME Foundation or the already-mentioned
Ubuntu in respect of Debian are examples of this first scenario. Sun and
OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris, or Red Hat with Fedora Core, are examples
of the second.
Expanding to other spheres
Free software has proven that in the field of producing programs there is anot-
her way of doing things. In practice, we have seen how granting the freedom
to distribute, modify and use can achieve sustainability, either through volun-
teer work, or through business generation that allows companies to survive.
As time passes, this same idea is being transferred to other spheres of intellec-
tual work. The Creative Commons licences have made it possible to free sp-
heres such as literature, music, or video. Wikipedia is proving that a field as
particular as the production of encyclopaedias can travel a very interesting
path. And there are more and more literary authors, music bands and even
film producers interested in models of free production and distribution.
In all these domains there is still a long way to go, and in almost all of them
practice has not yet fully proven that sustainable creation is possible with free
models. But we cannot deny that experimentation with it is reaching a boiling
point.
Free software as a subject of study
Although some works, such as the renowned "The cathedral and the bazaar"
cleared the way for the study of free software as such, it was not until 2001
and subsequent years that the academic community started to consider free
software as something worthy of study. Over time, the massive availability of
data (almost everything in the world of free software is public and available
from public information archives) and the innovations that free software has
provided have drawn the attention of many groups. Midway through the de-
cade of 2000 there are already several international conferences centred speci-
fically on free software, top-ranking magazines frequently produce articles on
it, and research-funding agencies are opening lines aimed specifically towards
it.