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 its definition can be found dating back to February 1986.^[1] 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. To avoid the ambiguity of the English word "free" (free as in beer versus free as in speech), and to avoid talking about the impact on freedom of non-free software, people have suggested alternative names. Clockwise from top: The logo of the GNU Project, the Linux kernel mascot Tux, and the BSD Daemon Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only... // The free software community is also called the open source community or the Linux community. ... Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated rms,[1] is a software freedom activist, hacker,[2] 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. ... Gratis versus Libre is the distinction between zero price and freedom. ... 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 alternative has been "open-source software".^[2] Open source software is computer software which source code is available under a license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open_source_definition. ...

Users of each of these terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices, but differ, according to Richard Stallman, in the respective philosophical values. Some people use "libre" (as in free speech) or "gratis" (as in free beer) 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 term FLOSS to refer to "open source" and "free software" without necessarily choosing between the two camps, though he has criticized the term FOSS as Free/Open seems to imply free-of-charge, while Free/Libre makes it clear the reference is to freedom. However, he asks people to consider supporting the "free software" camp.^[3] 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 and motivations

"Open-source software" was proposed in 1998 as "a replacement label"^[4] for "free software". Later that year, Open Source Initiative was founded to promote the term as part of "a marketing program for free software".^[5] The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software. ...

The term "open source software" was picked during a strategy session held in Palo Alto. Those present included Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon 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'".^{[6] [7]} (For others, the "political connotations" are a reason to stay with the term "free software".)^[8] Location in Santa Clara County and the state of California Coordinates: , Country State County Santa Clara Government  - Mayor Yoriko Kishimoto[1] Area  - City 25. ... 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. ... Year 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar). ... 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. ...

"Libre software" was first used publicly in 2000, by the European Commission.^[9] The word "libre", borrowed from the Spanish and French languages, means having liberty. This avoids the freedom/cost ambiguity of the word "free". Year 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display full 2000 Gregorian calendar). ... Berlaymont, the Commissions seat The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive branch 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.^[10] "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. Year 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday (link displays the 2001 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. ... Berlaymont, the Commissions seat The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive branch 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). ...

Unlike "libre software", which aimed to solve the 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 ^[11], Spain^[12], and Brazil.^[13]

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 .^[14] Another abbreviation is OSS/FS, although this hasn't seen much usage outside of the documents of David A. Wheeler.^[15] Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. ... This article is about the family of home computers. ... This article needs a complete rewrite for the reasons listed on the talk page. ... Categories: People stubs | 1965 births | Wikipedians with article ...

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 in anglophone 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 many of them 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: or , IAST: , IPA: ), an Indo-European language spoken all over India in varying degrees and extensively in northern and central India, is one of the two central official languages of India, the other being English. ... The article describes the languages spoken in the Republic of India. ... Sanskrit ( , for short ) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, 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 has acquired the same ambiguity of the English word "free".^[16] Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Filipino (formerly Pilipino) is the national and an official language of the Philippines 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".^[17] Bruce Perens is a leader in the Open Source and Free Software community. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Trademark. ... “(TM)” redirects here. ... 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

The choice of term has little or no impact on which licences are valid. The vast majority of software referred to by these terms is distributed under a small set of licences, all of which are unambiguously accepted by the various de facto and de jure guardians of each of these terms. 50-70% of this software is under the GNU General Public License, and most of the rest is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, the BSD Licence, the Mozilla Public License, the MIT Licence, and the Apache License, each with a share of between 2% and 10%.^[18] 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. ... The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. ... The BSD license is the license agreement that the BSD software (largely, a version of UNIX) is distributed under. ... In computing, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) is an open source and free software license. ... The MIT 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. ...

Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licences that they accept as complying with their definitions of free software and open-source software respectively.

• List of FSF approved software licences
• List of OSI approved software licences

Apart from these two organisations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licences comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian doesn't publish a list of "approved" licences, but its judgements can be tracked by checking what licences are used by software they have allowed into their distribution.^[19] 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. ... Debian is a free operating system. ... 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. ...

There is also a class of software that is covered by the names discussed in this article, but which doesn't have a licence: 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 free software licence to make it free software. 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. ... A free software licence is a software licence which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the software which would otherwise be prohibited by copyright law. ...

See also

Free software Portal

• Glossary of legal terms in technology
• GNU/Linux naming controversy
• Open source vs. closed source
• Permissive free software licences
• History of free software

Image File history File links Free_Software_Portal_Logo. ... The legal aspects of technology involve many different terms. ... The GNU/Linux naming controversy is a dispute between members of the free and open source software community relating to the normative branding of the computer operating systems commonly referred to as Linux. ... This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. ... Permissive free software licences are software licences for a copyrighted work that offer many of the same freedoms as releasing a work to the public domain. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

External links

• Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software, a GNU Project essay promoting the benefits of Free Software over Open Source, by Richard Stallman
• Why Free Software is better than Open Source, a GNU Project essay on the differences between Free Software and Open Source, by Richard Stallman
• 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).
• 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
• FSF's suggested translations of free software to languages other than English
• The Codebreakers - a free movie.

The GNU logo, drawn by Etienne Suvasa The GNU Project was announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. ... Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated rms,[1] is a software freedom activist, hacker,[2] and software developer. ... The GNU logo, drawn by Etienne Suvasa The GNU Project was announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. ... Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated rms,[1] is a software freedom activist, hacker,[2] and software developer. ... 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. ...

References