free, open-source software

About

"free, open-source software" is software which is not only free (as in either "costing nothing to obtain legally" or as in "free for additional copying and modifying", depending on who you talk to) but also open source (meaning that the source code is available for modification and re-distribution).

"Costing nothing to obtain legally" is sometimes referred to as "free as in beer", and "free for additional copying and modifying" is often referred to as "free as in speech" or "libre".

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Related Pages

• open format
• open hardware
  • The TAPR Open Hardware License

Links

• Open Source Versus: comparisons of open-source and proprietary software
• Essay by Tom Chance about the philosophical differences between "free", "open source", and "proprietary" software development

Reference

• Wikipedia

Writings

• 1998-02 Goodbye "free software"; hello, "open source": Eric S. Raymond's call to the community, issued immediately after the Netscape breakthrough, to start using the term "open source"

News

• 2006-09-19 Is Antivirus Ready for Open Source?: focus on ClamAV antivirus software
• 2006-03-16 Open, but not as usual (slashdot): how "open source" ideas interact with the world of business. At least one fact in this article is incorrect: "Wikipedia changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing entries." This is untrue (I was still able to edit a random article after logging out --Woozle 06:45, 28 April 2006 (EDT)).
• 2006-03-09 GPL 3.0: A bonfire of the vanities? (slashdot) by Jonathan Zuck of the Association for Competitive Technology (a more-or-less anti-open-source group)
• 2006-02-23 Free software? You can't just give it away (slashdot): apparently the freely-redistributable nature of FOSS causes confusion in some quarters
• 2005-11-11 Free Software's surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine