The Free Software Movement is the belief in user's rights to access and modify software at their discretion. Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation is credited with starting the movement in 1983 with his GNU Project.http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html Free Software (freeware) is software anyone can download and use for free. Shareware, on the other hand, is a try-and-buy software - it is not free. http://www.diffen.com/difference/Freeware_vs_Shareware This Mahalo page collects links to websites offering free downloads of software (see below), as well as links to pages that discuss the the philosophy of the Free Software Movement.ZNet: Free Software as a Social Movement (December 18, 2005)

The Free Software Foundation was founded in order to foster user rights in the area of software, as well as knowledge in general. The FSF defines free software as a piece of software whose license grants everyone the right to execute, analyze, modify and redistribute software freely as they wish.

The Free Software Movement differs from Open Source in that the Free Software Movement is a philosophy for developing software to the benefit of all people while Open Source views the argument from a more technical approach.

1. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the software as you wish.ZNet: Free Software as a Social Movement (December 18, 2005)
2. Freedom 1 is the freedom to study and change the source code as you wish.ZNet: Free Software as a Social Movement (December 18, 2005)
3. Freedom 2 is the freedom to copy and distribute the software as you wish.ZNet: Free Software as a Social Movement (December 18, 2005)
4. Freedom 3 is the freedom to create and distribute modified versions as you wish.ZNet: Free Software as a Social Movement (December 18, 2005)

Academic / Knowledge Management:

1. FreeMind - creation of two-dimensional visual models that establish relationships among concepts. FreeMind creates node and linkage maps that are useful for brainstorming or clustering, management of projects, and organizing knowledge. Color shading is available for differentiation of nodes. The generated maps can be embedded by a Java applet or Adobe Flash, or they can be exported a static images in several formats.http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/files/
2. KNIME - Konstanz Information Miner, open source data mining and analysis program, accepts ASCII format data, available for PC, Linux and Mac OS-X platforms. http://www.knime.org/

Games

1. Eclipse Crossword Maker - Excellent and easy-to-use program that can be used by teachers to help their students review key terms in different subjects or it can be used to make puzzles that are just plain entertaining. Available in Microsoft Windows.
2. Platformer Games - Several Mario Brothers games and other types are available at CNET http://download.cnet.com/windows/platformer-games/3150-7433_4-0.html?tag=ltcol;nav

Graphics:

1. GIMP - A pixel-based editor program that has a large number of the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, available for Mac OSX systems and PC platforms
2. Inkscape - Open source, vector-based software that has many of the capabilities of Adobe Illustrator. http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/freesoftware/Free_Graphics_Software.htm

Utilities

1. PC utiities - WinOptimizer and other programs. http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/freesoftware/Free_Graphics_Software.htm
2. Disc copying utility - ImgBurn can copy discs, make images and write discs from images. Very good and simple to understand program that is as good as any paid commercial program. http://www.imgburn.com/
3. FTP cient - CyberDuck for Mac OSX, also SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser http://cyberduck.ch/

Video Editing

1. LiVES - available in PC, Linux and Mac OSX, however the Mac version has not been extensively tested.
2. Video Spin - a downsized version of Pinnacle with many of its features. For PCs. http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/free-video-editors.shtml