Thank you very much for your interest on knowing more about the free/libre software movement.
To answer some of the questions we can split things into two sides: practical and ideological. "Practical" means what you can see in practice, and usually what you receive. "Ideological" is related to opinions and behavior of people. There are various things that *may* make functional/practical data/works (also includes software) non-free, such as: licenses, patents, trademarks, non-disclosure agreements, trade secrets, contracts (be it verbal or written), laws, technologies used. However, for all those things, it depends on how they impact the essential freedoms of free/libre functional/practical data/works. "functional/practical data/work" can be, for example: software, text fonts, documentation, and many other things I won't say for now. In the practical side, the freedom of some functional/practical data/work can be checked by seeing if the licenses, patents, trademarks, non-disclosure agreements, trade secrets, contracts, laws and technologies that are applicable to it can be problematic to the essential freedoms that we already know (I assume that you have already read what each one of those freedoms are, and that you already know that these freedoms must apply to everyone, without forbidding based on discrimination of nature/type of usage). This also requires that the work in question mustn't depend on other non-(free/libre) one in order to be made available. For example: If A is non-free, and B depends on A, then B is also non-free. There are some exceptions, but this is the general case. In the majority of the cases, if one wants to use some functional/practical data/work, then evaluating the practical side is enough. There are, however, some edge cases where the ideological side might prove to be an issue. This can be noticed in the difference between "free/libre software proponents" and "open source proponents". While both proponents work together in most cases and projects, the open source ones don't speak of the freedom of the practical/functional data/work, they think that simply appealing to "consumer values" is enough. Free/libre software proponents can also rely on those "consumer values", but they must make it clear that the essential freedoms exist and that these are most important. While the Open Source Definition is very similar to the Free Software Definition, and while both of those forbid digital handcuffs (this is not an absolute synonym for "non-(free/libre) software", it's a subset/subtype of it), what ends up happening is that the open source proponents allow digital handcuffs to be implemented in the products/projects that depend on the projects/products provided by these open source proponents. As an example of open source but not free/libre product/project we have Android project. The people behind Android project are allowing manufacturers to implement digital handcuffs via Restricted Boot (not Secure Boot), this completely forbids you from replacing the Android *itself* that you have with any other from anyone you trust, because the manufacturer won't allow you to tell the phone/tablet *who* you trust (example: you). Some tablets/phones have only Secure Boot (which allows you to define who to trust) or don't have any (which allows everything, even untrusted updates). Note that we are not talking about application updates, nor about the updates that Android itself tells you to do. There are more differences, but I'll let Bradley "bkuhn" Kuhn do the talking (optiona): [[https://sfconservancy.org/videos/2015-01-15_Bradley-Kuhn_Future-of-Copyleft_LCA-2015.mp4]], [[https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/29/vw/]], [[https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/copyleft-for-the-next-decade-a-comprehensive-plan/]]. Now for the other questions: About software downloaded using apt-get: They are free/libre as long as they come from Trisquel's default repositories. Some people tend to suggest adding "PPA" or "editing source.list", but I recommend you to avoid it unless the maintainer of the "PPA" in question is indeed a free/libre software activist. In fact, I found out that some individual packages from third-parties (not related to us free/libre software community) often add more PPAs without the user's consent. apt-get isn't distro specific. However, some distros choose to use it by default, while some others use other package managers. About the Free Software Directory: it's a collaborative attempt to list free/libre software. However, it's not always perfect, and somethings might be missing. It's better to complement the checking by visiting the other free/libre distros' default repositories and paying attention to any differences between what you are installing and what the other free/libre distros would tell the user to install. The Free Software Directory, as I just said, is a collaborative effort, and as such, if you can, please consider making small contributions to it (simply making a new entry with the package name, a short description and where to find it, is enough to at least make other volunteers know about it so that the reviewers/evaluators can check if it's free/libre or not). -- - [[https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno]] - Palestrante e consultor sobre /software/ livre (não confundir com gratis). - "WhatsApp"? Ele não é livre, por isso não uso. Iguais a ele prefiro GNU Ring, ou Tox. Quer outras formas de contato? Adicione o vCard que está no endereço acima aos teus contatos. - Pretende me enviar arquivos .doc, .ppt, .cdr, ou .mp3? OK, eu aceito, mas não repasso. Entrego apenas em formatos favoráveis ao /software/ livre. Favor entrar em contato em caso de dúvida.
