Justification of Free Software and its Enlightenment

摘要

Free software is given against the traditional proprietary software. There are huge differences between the free and traditional software in development, dissemination, improvement and their profit model. Restricting the freedom of software may lead to many negative effects, and advocating free software will not result in the lack of human resource, the decrease of efficiency and the reduction of quality in the development of software. In this paper, justification of Free Software and its enlightenment is given in detail. The free software movement reminds us of paying more attention to the aim of intellectual property law, i. e. promoting the public interest. The characteristics of software call upon a further thinking on protecting it by copyright.