"There's a long standing argument over the differences between Open Source Software and Free Software. But, a more common error outside of software ideology circles is that you can use Open Source Software anyway you please. Nope. Wrong. It's never been that way."Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
COMPUTERWORLD - Open source isn't free software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is computer software that can be classified as both free software and open source software. That is, anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright and the source code is usually hidden from the users.
Wikipedia.org
Free and Open Source Software, also F/OSS, FOSS, or FLOSS (for Free/Libre/Open Source Software) is software which is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. This approach has gained both momentum and acceptance as the potential benefits have been increasingly recognized by both individuals and corporate players.
F/OSS is an inclusive term generally synonymous with both Free Software and Open Source Software which describe similar development models, but with differing cultures and philosophies. Free Software (FS) focuses on the philosophical freedoms it gives to users and Open Source Software (OSS) focuses on the perceived strengths of its peer-to-peer development model. Many people relate to both aspects and so F/OSS is a term that can be used without particular bias towards either camp.
Free Software licenses and Open Source licenses are used by many software packages. The licenses have important differences, which mirror the differences in the ways the two kinds of software can be used and distributed and reflect differences in the philosophy behind the two.
Today the terms Free Software (FS) and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) mean the same thing (but Open Source Software or OSS (or if you prefer open source software oss) --- sometimes we only write open source --- is not equivalent to them). Despite some disagreements around minor differences, the term Open Source Software (OSS) had primarily the same meaning as FOSS for some time, guarded by the Open Source Initiative. However, by mid 2007 enough companies were opening some source while keeping advanced functionality closed that Open Source Software (OSS) came to mean Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) as well. As a result, either the specific term FOSS or COSS is now used instead of the general term Open Source to differentiate between the models and continue to preserve the original FOSS space.
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