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Last week for HFOSS(Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software IGME-582) at RIT I was introduced to three articles that pick apart the differences between "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" or "FOSS" and "FLOSS".
- How I coined the term 'open source' by Christine Peterson
- When Free Software Isn't (Practically) Superior by Benjamin Mako Hill
- Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software by Richard Stallman
Peterson's article discussed how she ended up coining the term Open Source and how that term ended up becoming widely used. She explained that Open Source software was a new word for Free Software that was used instead because it would be more friendly with businesses. At that time(and still to this point) Free software is confused with software that you can get at no cost. Free Software is really free as in speech rather than free as in beer. Peterson's phrase "Open Source" gained a foot hold with larger communities and businesses because it focused on the practical benefits of doing software development in a public manner. Open Source software focused on collaboration and how building software in the public could improve security -- this really enticed businesses. To this day we see that businesses like Microsoft latch on to the phrase Open Source.
//todo image of microsoft hearts open source
With this divide in phrasing, there was a ideological split as well. People like Stallman in the Free Software camp felt like the Open Source movement lacks integrity because they don't focus on Freedom like they do. In his article "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software", Stallman scarfs at the fact that some open source Linux distributions would offer the option to package proprietary(non-free) software.
In Hill's article he echoes the views of Stallman's article, however, he points out that in practice Free Software isn't doing "better" than Open Source Software. The median number of contributors to a SourceForge free software project is one. The large success of Open Source Software is large in due to the fact that it is able to draw in more developers and retain financial support from companies.
Despite the large overlap between Open Source software and Free Software, there are a few key distinctions. At a high level you can say that Free Software favors freedom, however, that is putting it in a very vague notion that can be interpreted in many ways. You could also put it in terms of the four R's of Free Software:
- Read
- Run
- Repurpose
- Redistribute
However, I like to analyze the differences between FOSS and FLOSS by looking at license types that they use.