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Free software , libre software , libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty , not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

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72-531: GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+ ) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License , allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the Wayland and X11 windowing systems . The GTK team releases new versions on

144-428: A negative or positive liberty . Due to their restrictions on distribution, not everyone considers copyleft licenses to be free. Conversely, a permissive license may provide an incentive to create non-free software by reducing the cost of developing restricted software. Since this is incompatible with the spirit of software freedom, many people consider permissive licenses to be less free than copyleft licenses. There

216-514: A copy of the free application itself. Fees are usually charged for distribution on compact discs and bootable USB drives, or for services of installing or maintaining the operation of free software. Development of large, commercially used free software is often funded by a combination of user donations, crowdfunding , corporate contributions, and tax money. The SELinux project at the United States National Security Agency

288-476: A drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $ 60 billion per year. Eric S. Raymond argued that the term free software is too ambiguous and intimidating for the business community. Raymond promoted the term open-source software as a friendlier alternative for the business and corporate world. The GNOME Project GNOME Project is a community behind the GNOME desktop environment and

360-547: A fee. The Free Software Foundation encourages selling free software. As the Foundation has written, "distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!". For example, the FSF's own recommended license (the GNU GPL ) states that "[you] may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for

432-447: A fee." Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated in 2001 that "open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." This misunderstanding is based on a requirement of copyleft licenses (like the GPL) that if one distributes modified versions of software, they must release

504-484: A for-profit, commercial activity or not. Some free software is developed by volunteer computer programmers while other is developed by corporations; or even by both. Although both definitions refer to almost equivalent corpora of programs, the Free Software Foundation recommends using the term "free software" rather than " open-source software " (an alternative, yet similar, concept coined in 1998), because

576-562: A new theme engine, improved accessibility using the Accessibility Toolkit , transition to Unicode using UTF-8 strings, and a more flexible API. Starting with version 2.8, GTK 2 depends on the Cairo graphics library for rendering vector graphics. GTK version 3.0.0 included revised input device handling, support for themes written with CSS -like syntax, and the ability to receive information about other opened GTK applications. The '+'

648-705: A post on the GTK development blog denoted, among other things, the future numbering scheme of GTK. GTK version 3.22, released in Autumn 2016, was planned to be the last 3.x release, although version 3.24 followed in Fall 2018 with the delay of GTK 4. The development of GTK 4 used version names 3.90, 3.92, etc. until the first GTK 4.0 stable release was launched in December 2020. Despite the first stable GTK 4 release, some applications using GTK still rely on GTK 2. For example, as of January 2022, GIMP

720-456: A regular basis. GTK 4 and GTK 3 are maintained, while GTK 2 is end-of-life . GTK1 is independently maintained by the CinePaint project. The GTK library contains a set of graphical control elements ( widgets ); version 3.22.16 contains 186 active and 36 deprecated widgets. GTK is an object-oriented widget toolkit written in the programming language C ; it uses GObject , that

792-559: A significant part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of dot-com companies . Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use; free software is a pure public good rather than a private good . Companies that contribute to free software increase commercial innovation . "We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that

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864-488: A small set of licenses. The most popular of these licenses are: The Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licenses that they find to comply with their own definitions of free software and open-source software respectively: The FSF list is not prescriptive: free-software licenses can exist that the FSF has not heard about, or considered important enough to write about. So it

936-493: A widget toolkit include: GTK programs can be run on desktop environments based on X11 and Wayland , or others including ones not made with GTK, provided the needed libraries are installed; this includes macOS if X11.app is installed. GTK can be also run on Microsoft Windows . It is used by some popular cross-platform applications like Pidgin and GIMP . wxWidgets , a cross-platform GUI toolkit, uses GTK on Linux by default. Other ports include DirectFB (for example used by

1008-530: Is a wrapper for ispell, hunspell , etc., the actual spell checker engine/software. GtkSpell uses GTK's GtkTextView widget, to highlight misspelled words and offer replacement. GTK was originally designed and used in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as a replacement of the Motif toolkit; at some point Peter Mattis became disenchanted with Motif and began to write his own GUI toolkit named

1080-617: Is an example of a federally funded free-software project. Proprietary software, on the other hand, tends to use a different business model, where a customer of the proprietary application pays a fee for a license to legally access and use it. This license may grant the customer the ability to configure some or no parts of the software themselves. Often some level of support is included in the purchase of proprietary software, but additional support services (especially for enterprise applications) are usually available for an additional fee. Some proprietary software vendors will also customize software for

1152-466: Is biased by counting more vulnerabilities for the free software systems, since their source code is accessible and their community is more forthcoming about what problems exist as a part of full disclosure , and proprietary software systems can have undisclosed societal drawbacks, such as disenfranchising less fortunate would-be users of free programs. As users can analyse and trace the source code, many more people with no commercial constraints can inspect

1224-535: Is consistent with the intended meaning unlike the term "Open Source". The loan adjective " libre " is often used to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free" in the English language , and the ambiguity with the older usage of "free software" as public-domain software. ( See Gratis versus libre . ) The first formal definition of free software was published by FSF in February 1986. That definition, written by Richard Stallman ,

1296-451: Is debate over the security of free software in comparison to proprietary software, with a major issue being security through obscurity . A popular quantitative test in computer security is to use relative counting of known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products that lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available. Free software advocates strongly believe that this methodology

1368-542: Is described in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file which is written by hand or generated by a GUI designer, which is then loaded at runtime and the objects created automatically. The description of the user interface is independent from the programming language being used. Language bindings are available for using GTK from languages other than C, including C++ , Genie, JavaScript , Perl , Python , Vala , and others . GTK supports various backends, which provides different ways to display GTK applications depending on

1440-463: Is like considering the practical advantages of not being handcuffed, in that it is not necessary for an individual to consider practical reasons in order to realize that being handcuffed is undesirable in itself. The FSF also notes that "Open Source" has exactly one specific meaning in common English, namely that "you can look at the source code." It states that while the term "Free Software" can lead to two different interpretations, at least one of them

1512-419: Is not covered by copyright law, such as software in the public domain , is free as long as the source code is also in the public domain, or otherwise available without restrictions. Proprietary software uses restrictive software licences or EULAs and usually does not provide users with the source code. Users are thus legally or technically prevented from changing the software, and this results in reliance on

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1584-491: Is not endorsed by the FSF and does not use Linux-libre, it is also a popular distribution available without kernel blobs by default since 2011. The Linux community uses the term "blob" to refer to all nonfree firmware in a kernel whereas OpenBSD uses the term to refer to device drivers. The FSF does not consider OpenBSD to be blob free under the Linux community's definition of blob. Selling software under any free-software licence

1656-415: Is permissible, as is commercial use. This is true for licenses with or without copyleft . Since free software may be freely redistributed, it is generally available at little or no fee. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as customization, accompanying hardware, support, training, integration, or certification. Exceptions exist however, where the user is charged to obtain

1728-511: Is possible for a license to be free and not in the FSF list. The OSI list only lists licenses that have been submitted, considered and approved. All open-source licenses must meet the Open Source Definition in order to be officially recognized as open source software. Free software, on the other hand, is a more informal classification that does not rely on official recognition. Nevertheless, software licensed under licenses that do not meet

1800-524: Is still being ported to GTK 3. The master branch of GTK utilizes Meson for its build automation. GTK (and GNOME, GLib, etc.) formerly utilized the GNU Build System (named Autotools) as the build automation system of choice. Since August 14, 2017, the Autotools build system files have been dropped. The most common criticism of GTK is the lack of backward-compatibility in major updates, most notably in

1872-644: Is still maintained today and states that software is free software if people who receive a copy of the software have the following four freedoms. The numbering begins with zero, not only as a spoof on the common usage of zero-based numbering in programming languages, but also because "Freedom 0" was not initially included in the list, but later added first in the list as it was considered very important. Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible. Thus, free software means that computer users have

1944-598: Is summarized at the Debian web site. It is rare that a license announced as being in-compliance with the FSF guidelines does not also meet the Open Source Definition , although the reverse is not necessarily true (for example, the NASA Open Source Agreement is an OSI-approved license, but non-free according to FSF). There are different categories of free software. Proponents of permissive and copyleft licenses disagree on whether software freedom should be viewed as

2016-577: Is the GLib object system, for the object orientation. While GTK is mainly for windowing systems based on X11 and Wayland , it works on other platforms, including Microsoft Windows (interfaced with the Windows API ), and macOS (interfaced with Quartz ). There is also an HTML5 back-end named Broadway . GTK can be configured to change the look of the widgets drawn; this is done using different display engines. Several display engines exist which try to emulate

2088-619: Is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC), an annual conference used to discuss the development and progress of GNOME. The idea of GUADEC events is attributed to the GNOME developers' and users' Paris meeting of 1998. An annual Asian conference called GNOME.Asia also exists. GNOME also participated in the Desktop Summit, which is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities that

2160-841: The GTK_DEBUG=interactive environment variable. It was introduced with GTK version 3.14. GTK is mainly developed by The GNOME Project , which also develops the GNOME Development Platform and the GNOME Desktop Environment . GTK is mainly written in C . Many language bindings are available . GTK development is loosely managed. GNOME developers and users gather at an annual GNOME Users And Developers European Conference GUADEC meeting to discuss GNOME's current state and future direction. GNOME incorporates standards and programs from freedesktop.org to better interoperate with other desktops. On September 1, 2016,

2232-730: The Apache web server; and the Sendmail mail transport agent. Other influential examples include the Emacs text editor; the GIMP raster drawing and image editor; the X Window System graphical-display system; the LibreOffice office suite; and the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems. From the 1950s up until the early 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the software freedoms associated with free software, which

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2304-475: The Debian installer ). Several desktop environments utilize GTK as the widget toolkit. The following window managers use GTK: For syntax highlighting there is GtkSourceView , "source code editing widget". GtkSourceView is maintained by GNOME separately from GTK as a library: gtksourceview. There are plans to rename to gsv. GtkSpell is a library separate from GTK. GtkSpell depends on GTK and Enchant . Enchant

2376-452: The GNU Project : a collaborative effort to create a freedom-respecting operating system , and to revive the spirit of cooperation once prevalent among hackers during the early days of computing. Free software differs from: For software under the purview of copyright to be free, it must carry a software license whereby the author grants users the aforementioned rights. Software that

2448-807: The GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. He developed a free software definition and the concept of " copyleft ", designed to ensure software freedom for all. Some non-software industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development process; scientists, for example, are looking towards more open development processes, and hardware such as microchips are beginning to be developed with specifications released under copyleft licenses ( see

2520-714: The Linux kernel and other device drivers motivated some developers in Ireland to launch gNewSense , a Linux-based distribution with all the binary blobs removed. The project received support from the Free Software Foundation and stimulated the creation, headed by the Free Software Foundation Latin America , of the Linux-libre kernel. As of October 2012 , Trisquel is the most popular FSF endorsed Linux distribution ranked by Distrowatch (over 12 months). While Debian

2592-635: The OpenCores project, for instance ). Creative Commons and the free-culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement. In 1983, Richard Stallman , longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , announced the GNU Project, saying that he had become frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users. Software development for

2664-472: The application programming interface (API) and theming. The result is that application developers or theme developers have to rewrite parts of their code to make it work with a newer version of GTK. The compatibility breaks between minor releases during the GTK 3.x development cycle was explained by Benjamin Otte as due to strong pressures to innovate, such as providing the features modern users expect and supporting

2736-410: The source code was distributed to use these programs. Software was also shared and distributed as printed source code ( Type-in program ) in computer magazines (like Creative Computing , SoftSide , Compute! , Byte , etc.) and books, like the bestseller BASIC Computer Games . By the early 1970s, the picture changed: software costs were dramatically increasing, a growing software industry

2808-458: The Foundation does coordinate releases and decide which projects will be part of GNOME. Membership is open to anyone who has made a non-trivial contribution to the project. Members of the Foundation elect a board of directors every November, and candidates for the positions must be members themselves. The GNOME Project holds several community programs and events, usually tailored to local users and developers. The main gathering of GNOME contributors

2880-495: The Free Software Definition cannot rightly be considered free software. Apart from these two organizations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines . Debian does not publish a list of approved licenses, so its judgments have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives. That

2952-536: The GIMP toolkit and had successfully replaced Motif by the 0.60 release of GIMP. Finally GTK was re-written to be object-oriented and was renamed GTK+. This was first used in the 0.99 release of GIMP. GTK was subsequently adopted for maintenance by the GNOME Foundation , which uses it in the GNOME desktop environment. The GTK 2.0.0 release series introduced new features which include improved text rendering using Pango ,

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3024-617: The GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. An article outlining the project and its goals was published in March 1985 titled the GNU Manifesto . The manifesto included significant explanation of the GNU philosophy, Free Software Definition and " copyleft " ideas. The Linux kernel , started by Linus Torvalds , was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. The first licence

3096-511: The Internet. Users can easily download and install those applications via a package manager that comes included with most Linux distributions . The Free Software Directory maintains a large database of free-software packages. Some of the best-known examples include Linux-libre , Linux-based operating systems, the GNU Compiler Collection and C library ; the MySQL relational database;

3168-588: The code and find bugs and loopholes than a corporation would find practicable. According to Richard Stallman, user access to the source code makes deploying free software with undesirable hidden spyware functionality far more difficult than for proprietary software. Some quantitative studies have been done on the subject. In 2006, OpenBSD started the first campaign against the use of binary blobs in kernels . Blobs are usually freely distributable device drivers for hardware from vendors that do not reveal driver source code to users or developers. This restricts

3240-747: The delegation of functionality to ancillary objects instead of encoding it into the base classes provided by GTK. Other changes include: At the 2018 edition of DevConf.cz , Matthias Clasen gave an overview of the then-current state of GTK 4 development, including a high-level explanation of how rendering and input worked in GTK 3, what changes were being made to GTK 4, and the reasons for those changes. Examples of things that have become possible with GTK 4 were given as well. Overall support for UTF-8 The last to support Windows 98 / Me Print support: GtkPrintOperation Caps Lock warning in password entry Improvements on GtkScale, GtkStatusIcon, GtkFileChooser Improvement on file chooser, printing To remove much of

3312-423: The freedom to cooperate with whom they choose, and to control the software they use. To summarize this into a remark distinguishing libre (freedom) software from gratis (zero price) software, the Free Software Foundation says: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in ' free speech ', not as in 'free beer ' ". ( See Gratis versus libre . ) In

3384-412: The goals and messaging are quite dissimilar. According to the Free Software Foundation, "Open source" and its associated campaign mostly focus on the technicalities of the public development model and marketing free software to businesses, while taking the ethical issue of user rights very lightly or even antagonistically. Stallman has also stated that considering the practical advantages of free software

3456-409: The government charged that bundled software was anti-competitive . While some software might always be free, there would henceforth be a growing amount of software produced primarily for sale. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began using technical measures (such as only distributing binary copies of computer programs ) to prevent computer users from being able to study or adapt

3528-501: The impression that users have an obligation (as opposed to a right) to give non-users a copy of the program. Although the term "free software" had already been used loosely in the past and other permissive software like the Berkeley Software Distribution released in 1978 existed, Richard Stallman is credited with tying it to the sense under discussion and starting the free software movement in 1983, when he launched

3600-483: The increasingly influential Wayland display server protocol . With the release of GTK 4, the pressure from the need to innovate will have been released and the balance between stability and innovation will tip toward stability. Similarly, recent changes to theming are specifically intended to improve and stabilise that part of the API, meaning some investment now should be rewarded later. Some notable applications that use GTK as

3672-421: The late 1990s, other groups published their own definitions that describe an almost identical set of software. The most notable are Debian Free Software Guidelines published in 1997, and The Open Source Definition , published in 1998. The BSD -based operating systems, such as FreeBSD , OpenBSD , and NetBSD , do not have their own formal definitions of free software. Users of these systems generally find

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3744-538: The look of the native widgets on the platform in use. Starting with version 2.8, released in 2005, GTK began the transition to using Cairo to render most of its graphical control elements widgets . Since GTK version 3.0, all rendering is done using Cairo. On January 26, 2018 at DevConf.cz , Matthias Clasen gave an overview of the current state of GTK 4 development, including a high-level explanation of how rendering and input worked in GTK 3, what changes are being made in GTK 4 (>3.90), and why. On February 6, 2019 it

3816-453: The lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages. Most companies in the software business include free software in their commercial products if the licenses allow that. Free software is generally available at no cost and can result in permanently lower TCO ( total cost of ownership ) compared to proprietary software . With free software, businesses can fit software to their specific needs by changing

3888-839: The necessary IPC between the X11 application and the X11 server, GDK is rewritten (mainly by Alexander Larsson) to use "client-side windows", i.e., the GdkWindow, which every widget must have, belongs now to the client Improvement on file chooser, keyboard handling, GDK Introspection data is now included in GTK Most GDK drawing are based on Cairo Many internal data are now private and can be sealed in preparation to GTK 3 The CUPS print backend can send print jobs as PDF GtkBuilder has gained support for text tags and menu toolbuttons and many introspection annotation fixes were added Migrating from GTK+ 2.x to GTK+ 3 Completed mostly Project Ridley All

3960-468: The publisher to provide updates, help, and support. ( See also vendor lock-in and abandonware ). Users often may not reverse engineer , modify, or redistribute proprietary software. Beyond copyright law, contracts and a lack of source code, there can exist additional obstacles keeping users from exercising freedom over a piece of software, such as software patents and digital rights management (more specifically, tivoization ). Free software can be

4032-435: The rendering is done using Cairo GDK became more X11 agnostic Free software The right to study and modify a computer program entails that the source code —the preferred format for making changes—be made available to users of that program. While this is often called "access to source code" or "public availability", the Free Software Foundation (FSF) recommends against thinking in those terms, because it might give

4104-511: The same set of software to be acceptable, but sometimes see copyleft as restrictive. They generally advocate permissive free software licenses , which allow others to use the software as they wish, without being legally forced to provide the source code. Their view is that this permissive approach is more free. The Kerberos , X11 , and Apache software licenses are substantially similar in intent and implementation. There are thousands of free applications and many operating systems available on

4176-435: The shift in climate surrounding the computer world and its users. In his initial declaration of the project and its purpose, he specifically cited as a motivation his opposition to being asked to agree to non-disclosure agreements and restrictive licenses which prohibited the free sharing of potentially profitable in-development software, a prohibition directly contrary to the traditional hacker ethic . Software development for

4248-461: The software applications as they saw fit. In 1980, copyright law was extended to computer programs. In 1983, Richard Stallman , one of the original authors of the popular Emacs program and a longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , announced the GNU Project , the purpose of which was to produce a completely non-proprietary Unix-compatible operating system, saying that he had become frustrated with

4320-512: The software platform upon which it is based. It consists of all the software developers, artists, writers, translators, other contributors, and active users of GNOME. It is no longer part of the GNU Project . In August 2000, the GNOME Foundation was set up to deal with administrative tasks and press interest, and to act as a contact point for companies interested in developing GNOME software. While not directly involved in technical decisions,

4392-443: The software themselves or by hiring programmers to modify it for them. Free software often has no warranty, and more importantly, generally does not assign legal liability to anyone. However, warranties are permitted between any two parties upon the condition of the software and its usage. Such an agreement is made separately from the free software license. A report by Standish Group estimates that adoption of free software has caused

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4464-411: The source and use the same license. This requirement does not extend to other software from the same developer. The claim of incompatibility between commercial companies and free software is also a misunderstanding. There are several large companies, e.g. Red Hat and IBM (IBM acquired RedHat in 2019), which do substantial commercial business in the development of free software. Free software played

4536-480: The system and environment. Examples of GTK backends are: There are several GUI designers for GTK. Here is a selection of GTK GUI designers: The GTK Inspector is a built-in interactive debugging tool in GTK, allowing developers to inspect and modify UI elements, test CSS changes, and analyze widget structure in real time. It can be enabled using the Control + Shift + I or Control + Shift + D shortcuts, or by setting

4608-495: The users' freedom effectively to modify the software and distribute modified versions. Also, since the blobs are undocumented and may have bugs , they pose a security risk to any operating system whose kernel includes them. The proclaimed aim of the campaign against blobs is to collect hardware documentation that allows developers to write free software drivers for that hardware, ultimately enabling all free operating systems to become or remain blob-free. The issue of binary blobs in

4680-606: Was a proprietary software licence. However, with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License . Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted the attention of volunteer programmers. FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD ) were released as free software when the USL v. BSDi lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995. Also in 1995, The Apache HTTP Server , commonly referred to as Apache,

4752-469: Was announced that GTK 4 will drop the “+” from the project's name. GDK acts as a wrapper around the low-level functions provided by the underlying windowing and graphics systems. GSK is the rendering and scene graph API for GTK. GSK lies between the graphical control elements (widgets) and the rendering. GSK was finally merged into GTK version 3.90 released March 2017. GtkBuilder allows user interfaces to be designed without writing code. The interface

4824-402: Was competing with the hardware manufacturer's bundled software products (free in that the cost was included in the hardware cost), leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of "free" software bundled with hardware product costs. In United States vs. IBM , filed January 17, 1969,

4896-587: Was dropped returning to simply 'GTK' in February 2019 during a Hackathon . HP stated that their goal was to merge the needed OpenVMS changes into the GTK Version 1.3 development stream, however this never materialised. The latest version of GTK for OpenVMS is version 1.2.10. One of the main changes made during the GTK 4 development cycle (i.e. GTK 3.92, etc.) was the removal of user customization options (like individual keyboard shortcuts that could be set in GTK+ 2), and

4968-552: Was held in Europe in 2009 and 2011. Among the project's community programs is Outreachy , established with the goals of increasing women participation and improving the resources available to all newcomers for getting involved in GNOME. GNOME Project is involved in development of a range of notable software, including: The GNOME Project actively collaborates with other free software projects. Previous collaboration efforts were ordinarily organized on project-to-project basis. To make

5040-469: Was released under the Apache License 1.0 . All free-software licenses must grant users all the freedoms discussed above. However, unless the applications' licenses are compatible, combining programs by mixing source code or directly linking binaries is problematic, because of license technicalities . Programs indirectly connected together may avoid this problem. The majority of free software falls under

5112-445: Was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could." The economic viability of free software has been recognized by large corporations such as IBM , Red Hat , and Sun Microsystems . Many companies whose core business is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to

5184-407: Was typically public-domain software . Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who welcomed the fact that people were making software that made their hardware useful. Organizations of users and suppliers, for example, SHARE , were formed to facilitate exchange of software. As software was often written in an interpreted language such as BASIC ,

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