gratis

Emulation was occasionally employed by console manufacturers in the early 1980s to allow games from other (and sometimes competing) hardware to be run on the manufacturer's device. The Atari 2600 was by far the most frequent recipient of this behavior. Atari's platform was easily the most popular and widespread early game consoles, and many developers touted compatibility with the system's vast library of games as a marketing ploy to attract customers. Coleco's Colecovision and Atari's own Atari 5200 provided add-on peripherals that allowed ...

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Console emulator, Console emulator - History, Console emulator - Arguments for/against emulation, Console emulator - Other uses

Read more here: » Console emulator: Encyclopedia II - Console emulator - History

A console emulator is a program for a computer, or other computing device, that can emulate a video game console or handheld, so a computer can be used to play games that were created for that console or to develop games for that console. Such tools are often used to translate games into other languages, to modify (or hack) existing games, or to produce homebrewed demos. Console emulation can also be achieved between consoles (hence cross-console emulation), making a modern video game console emulate a less advanced one.

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• Console emulator - History
• Console emulator - Arguments for/against emulation
• Console emulator - Other uses

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Before proceeding, it is worth noting that a computer program is inanimate and therefore not political in its own right. When we speak of the politics of Free Software, we seek to understand its social effects in the larger human context. Free software - Free software as a communist movement. SCO CEO Darl McBride and others have tended to characterise Free Software as communist. Communism is opposed to a free market and advocates common ownership of the means of production. This interpretation is based on ...

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Free software, Free software - Usage, Free software - History, Free software - Free software licenses, Free software - Examples of free software, Free software - Social significance, Free software - Positive Social Outcomes, Free software - Negative Social Outcomes, Free software - Political Characterisation, Free software - Free software as a communist movement, Free software - Free software as a libertarian movement, Free software - Individual motivations, Free software - Relative security, Free software - Free software controversies

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Besides free as in freedom, there is also another important meaning of the word free: free of charge. The two meanings of the term free are often illustrated with the phrases "free as in beer," which alludes to monetary price or cost but has little to do with freedom, and "free as in speech," which alludes to the widely recognized freedom of speech (see, for example, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution), but which has little to do with monetary price or cost. The usage of "free" in "free content" ...

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Free content, Free content - Libre and gratis, Free content - Free content and open content, Free content - Free-content licenses

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Free-content licenses may be copyleft—in which case modifications of the work must themselves be distributed only under the terms of the original free license—or else they are non-copyleft, which means that the licensed work may be modified and then distributed under a different license, even one that is less free. Most free-content licenses contain provisions specifying that derivative works must attribute or give credit to the authors of the original, a requirement which promotes intellectual honesty and discourages plagiarism without imposing so great a burden as to ...

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Free content, Free content - Libre and gratis, Free content - Free content and open content, Free content - Free-content licenses

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According to Stallman and the FSF, "free" software licenses grant: the freedom to run the program for any purpose (called "freedom 0") the freedom to study and modify the program ("freedom 1") the freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor ("freedom 2") the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits ("freedom 3") Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code access, because studying and modifying software without source code is extremely difficult and highly ...

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Free software, Free software - Usage, Free software - History, Free software - Free software licenses, Free software - Examples of free software, Free software - Social significance, Free software - Positive Social Outcomes, Free software - Negative Social Outcomes, Free software - Political Characterisation, Free software - Free software as a communist movement, Free software - Free software as a libertarian movement, Free software - Individual motivations, Free software - Relative security, Free software - Free software controversies

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The BitKeeper controversy in the free software movement illustrates the movement's major issues and points of view. Larry McVoy invited high-profile free software projects to use BitKeeper to attract paying users. In 2002 a controversial decision was made to use BitKeeper, a proprietary software product, to develop the Linux kernel, a free software project. The excerpt below illustrates why this proved to be a major source of controversy. "McVoy made the program available gratis to free software developers. This did not m ...

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Free software, Free software - Usage, Free software - History, Free software - Free software licenses, Free software - Examples of free software, Free software - Social significance, Free software - Positive Social Outcomes, Free software - Negative Social Outcomes, Free software - Political Characterisation, Free software - Free software as a communist movement, Free software - Free software as a libertarian movement, Free software - Individual motivations, Free software - Relative security, Free software - Free software controversies

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Free software - Positive Social Outcomes. Free software is generally available at little to no cost (it is gratis). When free software spreads, its utility is constant, or even increases due to network effects. Thus, free software is a pure public good rather than a private good. Its freedoms result in a permanently lower cost compared to proprietary software increasing access to software and to its ecomonic and scocial benefits. Due to this fact free software is becoming popular in third wo ...

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Free software, Free software - Usage, Free software - History, Free software - Free software licenses, Free software - Examples of free software, Free software - Social significance, Free software - Positive Social Outcomes, Free software - Negative Social Outcomes, Free software - Political Characterisation, Free software - Free software as a communist movement, Free software - Free software as a libertarian movement, Free software - Individual motivations, Free software - Relative security, Free software - Free software controversies

Read more here: » Free software: Encyclopedia II - Free software - Social significance

Console games for emulators are generally distributed as ROM images (or simply "ROMs") on the Internet. Without the permission of the copyright holder or the Entertainment Software Association, this practice is illegal—although few copyright holders appear to care about older games (see abandonware); many copyright holders are defunct; and a few copyright holders have even released their games and demos gratis or even as free software. This illegality is also controversial for long-time gamers and so called old-school gamers. One reason fo ...

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Console emulator, Console emulator - History, Console emulator - Arguments for/against emulation, Console emulator - Other uses

Read more here: » Console emulator: Encyclopedia II - Console emulator - Arguments for/against emulation

One advantage to ROM images is the potential for ROM hacking: amateur programmers and gaming enthusiasts have produced translations of foreign games, rewritten dialogue within a game, and applied fixes to bugs that were present in the original game. Software that emulates a console may be improved with additional capabilities that the original system did not have, such as anti-aliasing, audio interpolation, save states, online multiplayer options, or the incorporation of cheat cartridge functionality. Some popular console emulators include gnuboy, VisualBoyAdvance, FCE Ultra, nester, Snes9x, ZSNES ...

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Console emulator, Console emulator - History, Console emulator - Arguments for/against emulation, Console emulator - Other uses

Read more here: » Console emulator: Encyclopedia II - Console emulator - Other uses

To help distinguish libre (freedom) software from gratis (zero price) software, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement, developed the following explanation: "Free software is a matter of liberty not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'". More specifically, free software means that computer users have the freedom to cooperate ...

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Free software, Free software - Usage, Free software - History, Free software - Free software licenses, Free software - Examples of free software, Free software - Social significance, Free software - Positive Social Outcomes, Free software - Negative Social Outcomes, Free software - Political Characterisation, Free software - Free software as a communist movement, Free software - Free software as a libertarian movement, Free software - Individual motivations, Free software - Relative security, Free software - Free software controversies

Read more here: » Free software: Encyclopedia II - Free software - Usage

Notable free software: Operating systems: GNU/Linux, BSD, and Darwin. GCC compilers, GDB debugger and C libraries. Servers: BIND name server, Sendmail mail transport, Apache web server, and Samba file server. Relational database systems: MySQL and PostgreSQL. Programming languages: Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl. GUI related: X Window System, GNOME and KDE desktop environments. OpenOffice.org office suite, Mozilla and Firefox web browsers and the GIMP graphics editor. Typesett ...

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Free software, Free software - Usage, Free software - History, Free software - Free software licenses, Free software - Examples of free software, Free software - Social significance, Free software - Positive Social Outcomes, Free software - Negative Social Outcomes, Free software - Political Characterisation, Free software - Free software as a communist movement, Free software - Free software as a libertarian movement, Free software - Individual motivations, Free software - Relative security, Free software - Free software controversies

Read more here: » Free software: Encyclopedia II - Free software - Examples of free software

Individuals within a team typically have a wide variety of motivations. Stances on the relationship between free software and the existing capitalist economic system: Competition - free software and capitalism are incompatible, so more free software results in less capitalism. Inter-market competition - free software is a form of competition within capitalism. Copyright is governmental market restriction. ...

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Free software, Free software - Usage, Free software - History, Free software - Free software licenses, Free software - Examples of free software, Free software - Social significance, Free software - Positive Social Outcomes, Free software - Negative Social Outcomes, Free software - Political Characterisation, Free software - Free software as a communist movement, Free software - Free software as a libertarian movement, Free software - Individual motivations, Free software - Relative security, Free software - Free software controversies

Read more here: » Free software: Encyclopedia II - Free software - Individual motivations