This work represents an overview of general situation in current attitude among free software. It emphasizes mostly on the operational systems and particularly on products provided by Free Software Foundation (FSF) directed by Richard Stollman. Operational systems and software analyzed are UNIX-based and UNIX-like. The goal was to create objective point of view on the perspective of free software development competing with similar copy-righted commercial products. To realize this few examples of tests were presented. Tests were based on not too much detailed overview of such OSes like Linux Red Hat 5.0/5.2, Free BSD 2.2.6/3.0, Solaris 7, UnixWare 7. Features investigated are process of installation, user interface, language support, security issues, software available for analyzed OS (such as Web-server Apache, GCC etc.) and remarks about documentation. Growth of free software popularity is presented by statistics gathered from various Internet recourses and independent groups. As reference for the investigated topic a short list of helpful literature is presented at the end of work. Appendix contains list of GNU and other utilities available with distributions of free software.