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Free software is thought to have social significance and this can be explained as follows: Soon after free software begins circulation, it becomes available at little to no cost. 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. Another way free software is thought to be significant to society is due to its freedoms that result in lower cost than proprietary software. Due to this fact free software is becoming popular in third world countries such as Brazil. Furthermore, the openness of free software eases internationalization. International cooperation through free association produces most free software. The Oekonux and Hipatia projects contend free association could produce everything. Free association is also used for wiki writing, such as Wikipedia and give-away shops. There is controversy over the security of free software vs. proprietary software (a major issue being security through obscurity). A popular relative security measurement is counting known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products which lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available.

Free software movement: 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 propriatery 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 mean it was free software for them: they were privileged not to part with their money, but they still had to part with their freedom. They gave up the fundamental freedoms that define free software: freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose, freedom to study and change the source code as you wish, freedom to make and redistribute copies, and freedom to publish modified versions. The Free Software Movement has said "Think of free speech, not free beer" for 15 years. McVoy said the opposite; he invited developers to focus on the lack of monetary price, instead of on freedom. A free software activist would dismiss this suggestion, but those in our community who value technical advantage above freedom and community were susceptible to it. ... A free kernel, even a whole free operating system, is not sufficient to use your computer in freedom; we need free software for everything else, too. Free applications, free drivers, free BIOS: some of those projects face large obstacles -- the need to reverse engineer formats or protocols or pressure companies to document them, or to work around or face down patent threats, or to compete with a network effect. Success will require firmness and determination. A better kernel is desirable, to be sure, but not at the expense of weakening the impetus to liberate the rest of the software world."[3] McVoy withdrew permission for gratis use by free software projects. Many in the free software movement see the whole affair as a vindication of Richard Stallman's principled position over the more utilitarian approach of Linus Torvalds. "Proprietary software" is distributed under more restrictive software licenses. Copyright law restricts modification, duplication and redistribution rights to the copyright owner; software released under a free software license rescinds most of these reserved rights.