Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software : 9780262062466

Briefly stated, the terms “free software” and “open source software” refer
to software products distributed under terms that allow users to:

Use the software
Modify the software
Redistribute the software

in any manner they see fit, without requiring that they pay the author(s)
of the software a royalty or fee for engaging in the listed activities. In
general, such terms of distribution also protect what the publishing world
calls the “moral right” of the software’s author(s) to be identified as such.
Products such as the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache Web server,
the Mozilla Web browser, the PHP programming language, and the
OpenOffice productivity suite are all well-known examples of this kind of
software.

More detailed, formal definitions for the terms free and open source are
maintained—and vigilantly watch-dogged—by the Free Software Foundation
(FSF)1 and Open Source Initiative (OSI).2 However, the definitions are
substantively identical, and the decision to use one of these terms rather
than the other is generally ideological, rather than functional; the FSF
prefers the use of a term that explicitly refers to freedom, while the OSI
believes that the dual meaning of the English word “free” (gratis or libertas)
is confusing, and instead prefers the emphasis on the availability and
modifiability of source code.3 In Europe the French-English construct libre
software has been widely adopted to unambiguously capture the connotation
intended by the FSF.