Free Software and the Internet

Internet = network of networks

• The interconnection of all these networks requires common communication protocols.
• The TCP/IP stack has won against proprietary protocols.
• Internet standards are open standards.

The cooperative functioning of Free software:

• relies on the communication media offered by the Internet,
• is related to the Internet engineering tradition.

The Internet has always mostly worked with Free software:

• The TCP/IP stack (BSD),
• email (Sendmail),
• domain name services (Bind),
• web servers (Apache, figures).