Free & Open Source Software

"Free as in Freedom: Open Distribution; Open Modification"

The FOSS Philosophy is based primarily on the need for software to be free and enencumbered: there must be "open distribution and open modification"3

The "free" as is used in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) refers to free as in freedom. Often enough it also refers to free as in beer. However, for the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a major architect behind FOSS, the emphasis is on freedom:

• Freedom to run the program, for any purpose
• Freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
• Freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a monetary fee
• Freedom to change and improve the program and to redistribute modified versions of the program to the public, so others can benefit from your improvements4

The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a landmark software license that was authored by Richard Stallman, of the GNU Project, to promulgate the free software ideology.

For the open source adherents,

"[t]he basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing."5

Both of these philosphies are similar in many respects. And this is so since they descend from the philosophy that developed with the UNIX operating system: "the way of thinking that is UNIX:"6

• Write programs that do one thing and do it well
• Write programs to work together
• Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.7

Formerly an AT&T Bell Labs trademark

UNIX is now a trademark of the Open Group