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From the early 90s onward, alternative terms for free software have come into common use, with much debate in the free software community. The term "free software" was coined by Richard Stallman in 1983 when he launched the free software movement. Records of published version of the its definition can be found dating back to January 1989. The definition can be summarised as software which the user can use for any purpose, study the source code of, adapt to their needs, and redistribute - modified or unmodified.[1] To avoid the ambiguity of the English word "free", and to avoid talking about the impact on freedom of non-free software, people have suggested alternative names. // The free software community is also called the open source community or the Linux community. ...
This article is about free software as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. ...
Richard Matthew Stallman (often substituted as RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is an acclaimed software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. ...
The free software movement, also known as the free software philosophy, began in 1983 when Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project. ...
The Free Software Definition is a definition published by Free Software Foundation (FSF) for what constitutes free software. ...
Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ...
Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
Proprietary software is a pejorative term used by the Free Software Foundation to describe software in which the user does not control what it does or cannot study or edit the code, in contrast to free software. ...
"Open-source software", "Software Libre", "FLOSS" (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software), and "FOSS" (Free and Open-Source Software) are the most common alternative terms.[2] The most popular of these has been "open-source software".[2] Open source software is an antonym for closed source software and refers to any computer software whose source code is available under a license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. ...
Users of each of these terms share almost identical license criteria and development practices, but differ, according to Richard Stallman, in the respective philosophical values. Some people use "libre" to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free". However, these terms are mostly used within the free software movement and are slowly spreading. Stallman endorses the terms FLOSS and FOSS to refer to "open source" and "free software" without necessarily choosing between the two camps, but he asks people to consider supporting the "free software" camp. Gratis versus Libre is the distinction between no cost and freedom, a distiction not made by the word free. ...
The free software movement, also known as the free software philosophy, began in 1983 when Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project. ...
History
"Open-source software" was proposed in 1998 as a replacement label for "free software". Later that year, Open Source Initiative was founded to promote the term as part of "a marketing program for free software".[2] The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software. ...
"Libre software" was first used publicly in 2000, by the European Commission.[3] The word "libre", borrowed from the Spanish and French languages, does not have the freedom/cost ambiguity problem that "free" does. 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The Commission seat in Brussels The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive body of the European Union. ...
"FLOSS" was used in 2001 as a project acronym by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh as an acronym for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. Later that year, the European Commission (EC) used the phrase when they funded a study on the topic.[4] "FOSS" has since been used by others with the same meaning. The term FOSS was first formally introduced in the document, Use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense. 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh has been undertaking some very high-profile and extremely useful studies on Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS), both globally and in the developing countries. ...
The Commission seat in Brussels The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive body of the European Union. ...
Use of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense is a 2003 report by The MITRE Corporation that documented widespread use of and reliance on free and open source software (FOSS) within the United States Department of Defense (DoD). ...
The term "open source software" was picked during a strategy session held in Palo Alto. Those present included Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, John Hall, Sam Ockman, Christine Peterson, and Eric S. Raymond. The session was arranged in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator (as Mozilla). It aimed to ease business adoption of free software by getting rid of the zero-cost ambiguity, and to "avoid the political connotations of 'free software'".[5] Location of Palo Alto within Santa Clara County, California. ...
Larry Augustin is the chairman and founder of VA Software. ...
Jon maddog Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International [1], a non-profit organization of computer vendors who wish to support and promote the Linux operating system. ...
Eric S. Raymond (FISL 6. ...
Netscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape Navigator web browser as well as many other internet and intranet client and server software products. ...
1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean [1]. // Coated in ice, power and telephone lines sag and often break, resulting in power outages. ...
Netscape Navigator, also known as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that was popular during the 1990s. ...
Mozilla was the official, public, original name of Mozilla Application Suite by the Mozilla Foundation, nowadays called SeaMonkey suite. ...
Unlike "libre software", which aimed to solve an ambiguity problem, "FLOSS" aimed to avoid taking sides in the debate over whether it was better to say "free software" or to say "open-source software". The L for "libre" was included in the hope that it would clarify that the word "free" referred to freedom, not price.
Proponents of the term point out that parts of the FLOSS acronym can be translated into other European languages, with for example the "F" representing free (English) or frei (German), and the "L" representing libre (Spanish or French), livre (Portuguese), or libero (Italian). However, this term is not often used in official, non-English, documents, since the words in these languages for "free as in freedom" do not have the ambiguity problem of English's "free".
By the end of 2004, the FLOSS acronym had been used in official English documents issued by South Africa, Spain[6], and Brazil[7].
Minor terms At roughly the time the article introducing "FOSS" was being written, the similar term "F/OSS" appeared on a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to Amiga computer games .[8] Another abbreviation is OSS/FS, although this hasn't seen much usage outside of the documents of David A. Wheeler. Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ...
The original Amiga 1000 (1985) with various peripherals The Amiga is a family of home/personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation as an advanced home entertainment and productivity machine. ...
This article needs a complete rewrite for the reasons listed on the talk page. ...
Categories: People stubs | 1965 births | Wikipedians with article ...
A variation on FOSS, Free/Open Source Software/Code (FOSSC), is a less notable term used by a software programmer based in New Delhi, India.[9] This article is about the urban region that is the capital of India. ...
Richard Stallman has suggested that the term "unfettered software" would be an appropriate, non-ambiguous replacement, but that he would not push for it because there was too much momentum, and too much effort, behind the term "free software".
Non-English terms used in some English speaking regions The free software community in India sometimes uses the term "swatantra software", despite English being the lingua franca. This term, meaning freedom, comes from Hindi but is also understandable to speakers of other Indian languages, as they all have common roots in Sanskrit. // The free software community is also called the open source community or the Linux community. ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ...
Hindi (Devanagari: हिनà¥à¤¦à¥€ or हिंदी; IPA: ), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in northern and central India, is one of the official languages of the Union government of India. ...
The article describes the languages spoken in the Republic of India. ...
The Sanskrit language ( , for short ) is an old Indo-Aryan language from the Indian Subcontinent, the classical literary language of the Hindus of India[1], a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ...
In The Philippines, "malayang software" is sometimes used. The word "libre" exists in the Filipino language, and it came from the Spanish language, but "libre" acquired the same ambiguity of the English word "free". Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...
Filipino (formerly called Pilipino) is the national language and one of the official languages of the Philippines—the other one being English—as designated in the 1987 Philippine Constitution. ...
Ownership and attachments
 None of these terms, or the term "free software" itself, have been trademarked. Bruce Perens of OSI, attempted to register "open source" as a service mark for OSI in the United States of America, but that attempt failed to meet the relevant trademark standards. OSI claims a trademark on "OSI Certified", and applied for trademark registration, but did not complete the paperwork. The United States Patent and Trademark Office labels it as "abandoned". [10] Image File history File links GPL_and_open-source. ...
Bruce Perens is a prominent figure in the open source movement and to some extent in the free software movement. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Trademark. ...
A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by an individual, business organization or other legal entity to uniquely identify the source of its products and/or services to consumers, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities. ...
PTO headquarters in Alexandria The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or USPTO) is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that provides patent and trademark protection to inventors and businesses for their inventions and corporate and product identification. ...
While the term "free software" is associated with FSF's definition, and the term "open-source software" is associated with OSI's definition, the other terms have not been claimed by any group in particular. This, however, has not led to confusion since the definitions published by FSF and OSI are practically the same.
All of the terms mentioned here can be used interchangeably, the choice of which to use is mostly political (wanting to support a certain group) or practical (thinking that one term is the clearest).
Licences Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licences that they find to comply with their definition of free software and open-source software respectively. Apart from these two organisations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian doesn't publish a list of approved licenses, so its judgements have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives. The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) are a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in the main, free software distribution of Debian. ...
Most software packages that fall under the names used in this article are under a small set of licenses. 50-75% is under the GNU General Public License, and most of the rest are distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, the BSD License, the Mozilla Public License, the MIT License, and the Apache License. The following is a list of software licences which Free Software Foundation has approved as complying with their Free Software Definition. ...
An open-source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available under terms that allow for modification and redistribution without having to pay the original author. ...
The GNU logo The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely-used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. ...
GNU logo The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. ...
The BSD license is a permissive license and is one of the most widely used free software licenses. ...
In computing, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) is an open source and free software license. ...
The MIT License, also called the X License or the X11 License, originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a license for the use of certain types of computer software. ...
The Apache License (Apache Software License previous to version 2. ...
There is also a class of software that is covered by the names discussed in this article, but which doesn't have a license: software for which the source code is in the public domain. The use of such source code, and therefore the executable version, is not restricted by copyright and therefore does not need a license to grant the rights to use, study, modify, and redistribute. The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...
See also Image File history File links Portal. ...
The legal aspects of technology involve many different terms. ...
Quite possibly the gayest image ever made by anyone, ever. ...
This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. ...
Styles of licensing free software and free content are often categorised into two approaches. ...
This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
External links - Free Software Definition, Free Software Foundation Definition of free software by Richard Stallman
- Why Free Software is better than Open Source, GNU Project essay on the differences between Free Software and Open Source, by Richard Stallman
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond's essay about open source software
- Differences between open source and free software as interpreted by Slackware
- Berry, D M (2004). The Contestation of Code: A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free Software and Open Software Movement, Critical Discourse Studies, Volume 1(1).
- Stallman discusses the names "open source" and "free software", Tokyo 2006
- John Stanforth, an Open Source proponent, on the differences between the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation.
- EU study which, among other things, polled developers about terminology
Richard Matthew Stallman (often substituted as RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is an acclaimed software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. ...
Richard Matthew Stallman (often substituted as RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is an acclaimed software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. ...
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (abbreviated CatB) is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. ...
Eric S. Raymond (FISL 6. ...
Slackware was one of the earliest Linux distributions, and is the oldest, and most UNIX-like, distribution still being maintained[1]. It was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. ...
Wikibooks
References - ^ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
- ^ a b A poll at Free Software Magazine with 184 votes (as of March 2007)[1]
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