>>11796924Software are the apps that you run on your computer or phone.
An example of software would be the web browser you are using to post on 4chan.
There is a lot of software that is copyrighted. When it is copyrighted it is called proprietary software (because it is treated like property) .
Since proprietary software is copyrighted you are unable to share it with others and in many cases you are not allowed to look at the source code.
Your computer can only listen to the instructions given to it by the software. Meaning that software controls your computer.
When you use a piece of software that you cannot edit, You are letting the authors of the software tell your computer what to do.
There are many problems with allowing this to happen because your interests are different from the authors interests.
There are many cases where software authors have made user's computers do something against their interests.
These include :
Sending user data to their servers without asking the user
-Keeping users from downloading specific apps.
-Deleting books bought by users.
-Making the user's functional devices stop working so they will buy a new device
-and many other things
Due to these injustices, Richard Stallman founded the free software foundation and started the GNU project.
One of his first acts was to define what free software is.
Every piece of free software gives you the following freedoms
0. the freedom to use the program
1. the freedom to study and modify the program
2. the freedom to redistribute exact copies of the program
3. the freedom to redistribute modified copies of the program.
These four freedoms help defend you from the negative effects of proprietary software. by allowing anybody to combat abusive code by modifying the software to fix the abusive code. The two other freedoms allow the person who modified the code to help others by distributing the fixed version of the program.
