Free Software FoundationThe Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ("share alike") terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, US, where it is also based. From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project.
Software relicensingSoftware relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one. Sometimes open-source software projects get stuck in a license incompatibility situation.
Creative Commons licenseA Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
FLOSS ManualsThe FLOSS Manuals (FM) is a non-profit foundation founded in 2006 by Adam Hyde and based in the Netherlands. The foundation is focused on the creation of quality documentation about how to use free software. Its web site is a wiki (previously using the TWiki and Booki programs, now using Booktype) focused on the collaborative authoring of manuals. The documentation is licensed under the GPL. Although initially the manuals were covered by the GFDL, the material was relicensed to the GPL due to concerns about the limitations of the GFDL.
GNewSensegNewSense was a Linux distribution, active from 2006 to 2016. It was based on Debian, and developed with sponsorship from the Free Software Foundation. Its goal was user-friendliness, but with all proprietary (e.g. binary blobs) and non-free software removed. The Free Software Foundation considered gNewSense to be composed entirely of free software. gNewSense took a relatively strict stance against proprietary software. For example, any documentation that gave instructions on installing proprietary software was excluded.
Free contentFree content, libre content, libre information, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, meaning "works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose." A free cultural work is, according to the definition of Free Cultural Works, one that has no significant legal restriction on people's freedom to: use the content and benefit from using it, study the content and apply what is learned, make and distribute copies of the content, change and improve the content and distribute these derivative works.
Wikimedia FoundationThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best known as the hosting platform for Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, it also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software. The Wikimedia Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida, by Jimmy Wales as a nonprofit way to fund Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other crowdsourced wiki projects that had until then been hosted by Bomis, Wales's for-profit company.
Multi-licensingMulti-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licenses used, e.g. dual-licensed for software licensed under two different licenses. When software is multi-licensed, recipients can typically choose the terms under which they want to use or distribute the software, but the simple presence of multiple licenses in a software package or library does not necessarily indicate that the recipient can freely choose one or the other.
WikinewsWikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying, "On Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article." Wikinews's neutral point of view policy aims to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews. In contrast to most Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikinews allows original work in the form of original reporting and interviews.
Definition of Free Cultural WorksThe Definition of Free Cultural Works evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses. The Open Content Project by David A. Wiley in 1998 was a predecessor project which defined open content. In 2003, Wiley joined the Creative Commons as "Director of Educational Licenses" and announced the Creative Commons and their licenses as successors to his Open Content Project. Therefore, Creative Commons' Erik Möller in collaboration with Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Benjamin Mako Hill, Angela Beesley, and others started in 2006 the Free Cultural Works project for defining free content.
