History
Although the use of libre in English for this meaning is a relatively recent one, the concept of works that are free of permission restrictions is as old as print itself. The Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest dated printed book, includes the sentence:
Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong
The use of libre in English to describe free software dates back at least to 1995. The term software libre has since been used by the European Commission. However, the concept of libre licensing existed well before the term was coined.
The first libre definition was the free software definition published by the Free Software Foundation in 1986. Although limited to software, its four freedoms effectively identified those freedoms required for all libre works and the free culture and libre knowledge movements have used very similar freedoms in their definitions of free content and libre knowledge.
In 1994, Ram Samudrala published the Free Music Philosophy. Mirroring the free software movement, it called for artists to allow their songs and compositions to be distributed with fewer copyright restrictions.
In 1998, the term open source was suggested as a substitute to free software because it avoided the ambiguous double-meaning of ‘free’ in English and was not as value-laden as the term free software. In that year, David A. Wiley coined the term OpenContent to describe both a particular licence and the broader concept of non-software libre works. Ironically, the OpenContent License is not libre because it forbids making copies for profit.
Drawing on Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (published in 2002), the free culture movement promoted the distribution of cultural works under similar terms to those free software is distributed under. One of the more active manifestations of this movement has been Students for Free Culture.
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