Glossary

From ADFA: Audenshaw Digital Freedom Association

This page is a glossary of terms or names that may be used on this website. The definitions on this page are deliberately as short and simple as possible; a link is provided to the relevant Wikipedia article, but these may be overly technical. If there's anything you don't understand, please comment on the talk page.

1 Acronyms
2 People
3 Software names
4 Other

[edit] Acronyms

DRM - Digital Rights Managment
OS - Operating System
OSS - Open Source Software, an alternative name for Freedomware
FOSS - Free Open Source Software, another alternative name for Freedomware
FLOSS - Free Libre Open Source Software, yet another alternative name for Freedomware
FSF - Free Software Foundation
EFF - Electronic Frontier Foundation

[edit] People

rms - Richard Matthew Stallman - one of the first people to be concerned with software liberty. Founder of the GNU project and creater and director of the FSF. (more)

[edit] Software names

GNU - A freedomware operating system. Is usually combined with the Linux kernel to form the GNU/Linux operating system. (more)
Linux - Technically just the name of a kernel. (more) but commonly refers to the "Linux operating system": a combination of the GNU tools and the Linux kernel.
GNU/Linux -The preferred name for the "Linux operating system" in order to give GNU due credit, and reference the ethical ideas of the free software movement. This is the name we will try to use on this site. (more)

[edit] Other

[edit] Operating System

The collection of software that provides the basis of your computer. E.g. Windows, Mac OS X or GNU/Linux. (more)

[edit] Source code

The code that software is written in that can be read by humans (as opposed to machine code, or the binary which is what the computers read). You can think of it as the recipe of a piece of software. (more)