Hello all, I've been using Trisquel for a few months now based on learning about it on the FSF site, and have been enjoying it very much. Also I am learning more and more about free software and am proud to say I just ordered an external wifi card from Think Penguin that supports free software to use with my laptops running Trisquel.
My questions: How can it be determined if a piece of software is free? And my side question: if I am installing software from Trisquels apt-get via the command line, is that software guaranteed to be free? It is not clear to me if apt-get is distro specific or not. I wanted to bring this up to get back to my first question...lets say I am installing a program or a dependency, and I am using apt-get install (and installing it before it was ever on my computer) what tools do I have for determining if it is free? Is it fair to assume there is free software that may not be listed in the FSF Free Software Directory? Is it all about a piece of software having a free license? I have been have been meaning to do more research about the licenses but haven't gotten far so I am not too knowledgeable, is this even possible to determine before downloading and install the software? Anyways thanks to anyone who can help and I am glad to be a part of the community. ~Andrew
