IMO both of these ended up being poor names.
“Open source” can be co-opted to mean any project with public source code even if it’s not open contribution (think SQLite, and many of the projects effectively run by major tech corporations).
“Free software” falls victim to the eternal mixup with freeware, requiring the endless repetition of the “beer vs. speech” analogy.
I personally think “Libre software” is the term that best encapsulates the intended meaning while being unambiguous and not vulnerable to misinterpretation.
It’s FOSS not clear enough?
Lets not forget: Linus Torvalds and the Linux Foundation’s policies don’t actually believe in software freedom. The refusal to upgrade to GPLv3 has directly impacted those who use ChromeOS, Android, and WSL; as well as appliances that use GNU/Linux.
They do not believe in liberation.
(Inb4 someone parrots the “pragmatism” fallacy and proves my point again)
Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman never agreed one another. Their principles are very different, Torvalds is more like a tech boy that is inclined to business in other hand we have Stallman that is more a tech philosopher. I am with Stallman. But both are very important for FOSS community. I equally respect both.
I also respect both I agree (no GNU/Linux user would deny that), but Torvalds has faced little to no mainstream criticism on his hypocritical stance. Take one look at the Linux Foundation’s top board members and see if they represent the Freeworld. Torvalds directly benefits from a lack of political ethos on Free software.
Stallman asks for the name GNU/Linux to be used and gets bullied online (to this day) by ignorant users who refuse to learn the history. Torvalds directly enables the subjugation of others via tivoization and weak copyleft? The “FOSS community” is near silent in comparison. All in the name of pragmatism that has left so many users uneducated and confused.
When Stallman tells us to say “Free software” he does not mean to say “free for me but not for thee (because I have to feed my rhetorical family in this fast-paced economy).” He seeks total liberation.
Join us now and share the software
You will be free hackers, you will be free
Open Source: The source is available to inspect for security issues and can be improved upon by anybody who wants to participate. Most of the times the software development is financed by donations in cash from users or in time from developers.
Free software: Software you get for free, usually paid for by siphoning off data, running ads (which include trackers), … sometimes open source, most of the times closed source.
No, that’s free software, small f. Free Software, capital F, is software which respects your four fundamental software freedoms: to run, study, redistribute, and modify the software.
Open Source is a capitalist trick to make the source code available without necessarily preserving those freedoms.
Open-source preserves these freedoms. Source-available is the term for software that doesn’t respect user freedoms, but allows to access the source code.
Indeed, most open source software is available under licenses like GPL, which enforces the preservation of those freedoms.
