Free software falls into two categories; promotional freebies, and software developed to help people fight back against the power of the big software providers.
Free software as a commercial giveaway
Many commercial publishers offer free versions of their software, hoping it'll become the industry standard in its category. After all, having a product sitting on millions of PCs is a fantastic marketing tool. Then they try to persuade you to upgrade to 'advanced' or 'corporate' versions.
Open source software, Freeware, and Shareware
The other side of free software comes from the thousands of developers, both amateur and professional, who contribute to developing free applications so as not to be tied to big software houses, especially Microsoft.
This software falls into two categories:
Open source software
As well as being free, here the code used to write the program (effectively the program itself) is available too, so anybody that wants to can work on improving it. This has pros and cons. The bonus is it's constantly being honed and updated, and the problem's that support is often limited as there are no big bucks backing it up. The open source model has come a long way since it began, and the growing popularity of Linux-based operating systems and programs like Mozilla Firefox suggests it'll only continue to grow.
Freeware and Shareware
As the name suggests, freeware costs nothing, though some developers request a donation if you like it. The difference is that here you can't access the source code, so development is centralized in one location. Shareware is similar, except here the software's only free for a limited period, after which you have to either pay to register it, or lose some of the functionality (or have an annoying reminder message pop up every time you use it).
Generally there's less shareware and freeware available as more software goes open source, which is a good thing for people that are easily irritated by 'nag screens' (ie. Just about everyone I've ever met).
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