What's it all about... good question and although I'm still finding out about it I'll try and give you my answer. I feel the need to throw in here a disclaimer that what follows are my impressions and opinions and if I have any facts wrong please correct me. If you have a problem with anything else I say post a comment in my discussion area, please... please!.
Why talk about it here... another good question. Because the word Free figures very prominantly, although I believe a better one to use is Freedom.
What is it... hey, three for three. New Wave... New Age... my favourite is a concept, or even simpler, a belief who's time is about to come. This belief is that the computer software world will be a far better place if there's a lot more openness and sharing and a lot fewer restrictive practices.
This all comes down to what happens once a program is created and how much or how little the author(s) wishes to protect. The "guts" of any program is the source code and the creation of this is what takes the time and the money. Most individual programmers and/or software companies fight like mad to protect this code and their rights to it. You see this with just about every program downloaded... even most freeware can be freely distributed but the source code cannot be touched. I have no objection whatsoever to this but I do begin to have real problems when it seems that rights are acquired just to supress what could be a significant step forward.
The easiest way to block something you don't like or don't want to compete with is to buy the rights or even the company and kill it. A very effective way of avoiding this is to make sure nobody has a monoply and everybody has access to the source code. If it's bad it will die out anyway but if it's good, it cannot be gathered up and suffocated. Just to emphasise one point, we are not talking about all software becoming free. This is about being able to take someones software and build on it, improve it, make it more flexible. Money will very often change hands but freedom to do these things is granted.
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