What Is Libre?
The word "free" in English means a couple of things. If someone is giving something away and not charging any money; that item is "free". You have the right to say whatever you want; your speech is "free". The first kind of free, in Latin, is "gratis". The second kind, freedom, is "libre". That is the kind of "free content" that the YHS Libre User Group is about.
Whether content is libre depends on what you can do with it. For something to be truly free, you, the user, must be able to:
- use it for anything you want
- study how it works (in the case of software, using the source code that makes it run)
- make copies of the content, and share them with whomever you want
- and change the content, and share your new version
If you can do these things, then the software you are using or book you are reading or web site you're looking at is libre -- free.
That's the kind of software we advocate. Firefox, a popular web browser, is free software. OpenOffice is a free replacement for Microsoft Office. There are also free operating systems, like GNU/Linux. A great one to start with is Ubuntu Linux. In addition to being libre, this software is gratis: You can download it for free. Ubuntu will even send you gratis pressed CDs through the mail!
For more information on free software, visit the Free Software Federation and look at their definition of free software. For more free software you can use, see our links page.