Good morning.

Some of you ask me: what do you do for a living?

Normally I answer I am doing software related work for vehicle systems.

Software? The reaction seems that I am talking something mysterious or far away from our daily life.

Dear Fellow members, Distinguished guests,

In all aspects, Software is one thing that has been changing the world for the last few decades. Each and every one’s life is connected to software more than the Covid-19.

Do you agree?

Today I want to talk to about

1. what is software?

2. what is free software?

3. some examples of free software for our daily use

You can raise your questions at the end of my talk.

what is software

As we see, we use software every day, wechat is a software, for example.

For me, software is a program, and it is product. It has different appearances.

Sometimes it is like this (an icon) - how do you run this program?

In general, a software is program, and it is a file in your device.

Sometimes it is like this (binary form) - could you read it? Could you understand what the program is doing? I think this is why people think software is mysterious.

Sometimes it is like this (source code form) - could you read it? Is it still mysterious?

From the source code to binary you need a compiler, like this. In the past, if you can make a good compiler, you would make a good fortune, as least a millionaire.

Binary is for the computer, and source code is for human beings.

One question to you all, what do you get for your program? Is is in binary form, or in source code form?

If human beings could not understand binary, why wouldn’t we get the source code?

This is not ethical, not justice. Our computing freedom should not be controlled by other people.

Here comes free software.

what is free software

Who can tell us what is the Chinese for Free Software?

Free as an English word has 2 basic meaning:

1. free of charge, like free lunch; we can use gratis instead of free for this meaning.

2. free as in freedom, like free speech; this is the meaning for free software; sometimes we also use libre software to refer to the same thing.

The official definition of Free Software is

• Freedom 0: free to run the software as you wish for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: free to study how the software works and make changes as you wish.
• Freedom 2: free to distribute the original software.
• Freedom 3: free to distribute you modified version of the software.

In short, Free software means user can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

The software which is not free software we call it nonfree software, or proprietary software. Nonfree software will not give 4 freedoms above.

some free software for you and for me

You deserve free software, but you are not used to having free software.

Let’s check if you can tell if the following programs are free software.

Wechat

Microsoft Powerpoint

Here I have some free software for you to use

Firefox - a web browser

Jitsi meeting - a group meeting application

LibreOffice - a suit to replace the nonfree MS Office.

As a software user, the only way to have control over our computing is to use Free Software.

summary

After this sharing, if I want you to take something with you, I would say

1. use Gratis instead of free when you mean costless

2. use free software instead of proprietary software when possible

A thousand-mile journey starts with a single step, each step towards your software freedom is a good step.

Thank you.