Free & Open Source Software

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

Richard M Stallman invents "GNU's Not Unix" in 1984, and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) are the leading players in the FOSS world. And though they share ideologies, they are different in how they each look at "free" and "open" software. For the FSF, the difference comes down to "[o]pen source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement."2 Free Software advocates believe that software should be free for ethical reasons; opens source believers favour the practical approach to free software.

Stallman and the FSF are the idealists demanding unbridled freedom for source code (the software code); the OSI are the pragmatists delivering a more practical and cirxcumscribed "freedom," that is more amenable to a wider audience.

OSI was founded in 1998/9 with one of its prime objective to develop a standard by which software code can be validated as being "open source" software. By and large this was to foster closer cooperation between open source and the broader commercial interests.